Burgi Zenhaeusern
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burgi.bsky.social
Burgi Zenhaeusern
@burgi.bsky.social
1.7K followers 1.3K following 970 posts
Loves books. Writes poems.
She/her
For everything else (incl. WHITE DOOR order link): https://linktr.ee/burgitree

Banner: shadows of cast-iron chair & plant on flagstones.
Headshot: white woman (long hair, glasses) smiling
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burgi.bsky.social
"Father is holding you
[...]
and mother wolves you out
with white patience we remember"

How everything flows into each other in this Reckoning with a newborn or is it the newborn's reckoning? The marvel of it all!
Sahar Muradi's OCTOBERS (@upittpress.bsky.social, 2023)
❤️✨🌟✨❤️

#poetry 📚💙
Cover of Octobers shows detail of art by Saadia Batool: A Thread to Map a Route, 2022. Mixed media on canvas. It features sketch-like drawings and patterns overlaid onto a family photo (parents standing to the side of three children, toddler to primary school age, all standing, not all facing the camera) Reckoning In the gray milk gaze of your beginning I see the branches gather Your first reckoning with light its brimless hat, its unmitigated news and an origin to wish back to Now the branches are gathering the shadows are passing drumming mountains fitted with stars made stars by the blush of your soft balloon Father is holding you beholding your accordion in fits of certain being that shame the rest of us in our having been and outgrown the wonder And all that is crooked bone, sight, and sound meets your pounding instrument arching toward planted stars Until everything shatters with the squawk of a small pink urgent and mother wolves you out with white patience we remember How your thousand faces the far cells of your body flicker like an athlete finding new meaning you beg us back
November 30, 2025 at 10:54 PM
burgi.bsky.social
You might appreciate this poem this morning by Susan Scheid from her new book True Blue (Finishing Line Press, 2025) 🙂
Text of Susan's longish poem Poem of Fucking Gratitude. Apologies for not transcribing it, am not in a place where I can do so. But, you can find it transcribed at my post from yesterday about her new book True Blue.
November 21, 2025 at 3:45 PM
burgi.bsky.social
And here another gem from Susan Scheid's TRUE BLUE.
Ars Musicorum there is music in silence and the tiniest bird song layer upon layer of sound the murmur of a purr the scratch of a pen the forgiveness of the paper
November 20, 2025 at 8:56 PM
burgi.bsky.social
Today I give you TRUE BLUE (Finishing Line Press, 2025) by Susan Scheid, with its "Poem of Fucking Gratitude"

"because / the sky can be so fucking blue and the music so damn happy."
😊🥰😍

#poetry 📚💙
Cover of True Blue shows art by Kassim Okusaga: a stylized, blue room with French doors, a trolley, standing lamp, and a reading-chair next to a window with colorful shades in orange and yellows. There's a suggestion of the sun and moon as well. The title and author name are integrated into the drawing in style and placement. Poem of Fucking Gratitude for Persis K Today is the free day on my cursing diet, so I have to write this poem of fucking gratitude. Gratitude because this morning the sky is a goddamned beautiful bodacious blue, so clear that you can see into forever. Gratitude because the music on the radio is so damned cheerful that it makes me want to dance, makes me feel the closest to joy I have felt in months. Gratitude because of all the goddamned poets who bleed their words onto pages and write their damned souls out every day, just to bring some fucking beauty into this shitty world, just to speak some fucknig truth in this world full of alternate facts. I love them and they are my kin. Gratitude because sometimes on a day like today, you have to be fucking grateful, because the sky can be so fucking blue and the music so damn happy. Gratitude because sometimes you have to open the floodgates of your heart to the goddamned shitty world, in order to see who you really fucking are.
November 20, 2025 at 8:56 PM
burgi.bsky.social
THANK YOU to @kathryncowles.bsky.social, @hanvanderhart.bsky.social & @kaseyryoen.bsky.social for supporting WHITE DOOR (Carbonation Press) with their generous words. I'm beyond honored! 💖🙏💖

And thank you, too, to Alan Sirulnikoff for letting me use his wonderful art for the cover! 🙏💖😍
Three copies of WHITE DOOR on patterned upholstery fabric. Cover image shows detail of Alternative Reality by Alan Sirulnikoff, photography: long logs and a white door among them, floating on dark water. Image of blurbs as appearing in book listing: From the first astonishing poem of White Door you can feel it—the stitching together of separated things, the line pulling away from the sentence and then hard-threaded back at stanza’s end, the then pulling away from the now, the child from the mother, frayed, and then hand-sewn back. Burgi Zenhaeusern’s language is stitch-work, textile, sensory, but the kind of sensory that begins to lean figurative, to mean more than it says. The I can be “light forced through / split clouds,” or “my shiny coin” can be “falling into the empty well of me—its bright ping,” the sun can be a she, “her mouth a white-hot hole,” fear can be “packed like old snow.” When I look up after disappearing into the careful weave of these poems, I am amazed to find how far moved I am from where I started, how completely everything behind me has changed in the new light. - Kathryn Cowles, author of Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World Framed by the tender ordinary, by branches through the kitchen window, by generational memory and a grandfather’s painted Alpine meadow, Burgi Zenhaeusern’s White Door asks the central question of poetry: “How long / can you continue without yearning?” Simone Weil wrote that unmixed attention is prayer, and this collection streams with the light of attention and language that feels to me holy. - Han VanderHart, author of Larks In White Door, Burgi Zenhaeusern circles back again and again to necessary, enduring questions—how to care for each other, what home is—refusing to settle for anything less than the real. Despite the way exploration tends to “re-etch longing,” despite the complexities of language and being, these poems do not give up their hunger to understand. Intelligence and integrity shine through them. Kasey Jueds, author of The Thicket
November 15, 2025 at 9:28 PM
burgi.bsky.social
My debut collection WHITE DOOR is out!!! 💃✨💃
Thank you Carbonation Press & @gregbem.bsky.social!
Link to order and more info in 🧵
DM for signed copies/to review 🙏💙
Watch this space for events/news 😊
three copies of white door on patterned upholstery fabric. cover image shows detail of Alternative Reality by Alan Sirulnikoff, photographer: logs floating on dark water and a white door among them. front and backside of bookmark on same surface. Front shows detail of book cover, centering the door among logs. title isn't shown. Backside has a poem from the book printed on it plus attributions: Horizons Traditions I keep take hold in this soil slowly— home grows fainter still until distant slopes briefly make me forget where I am, re-etch longing. yours truly (white woman, shoulder-length dark-blondish hair, glasses, dark green sweater, scarf with green and gray leafmotif) smiling into camera holding the book in front of her, white bookshelves along white walls in the background.
November 15, 2025 at 8:44 PM
burgi.bsky.social
"In the body, the mind, a mouth. Agape."
On Loss in Leila Chatti's Wildness Before Something Sublime (@coppercanyonpress.bsky.social, 2025).
What a book!!!!!! 💖✨💖

PS: #comma

📚💙
cover is split horizontally into two parts, close to the center. The upper part shows an opening in dark woods onto a full moon. The lower part shows a barefoot figure (neck down, her head seemingly covered by the upper image) standing to the left of the title (big, white cursive lettering). She (probably) has long braids and wears a white nightshift, her torso partially hidden behind oak branches. She holds a flame in both hands. A black bird sits to her right on the ground. The entire cover is the color palette of night. On Loss When the stopped. When the vanished. Like a dream—the violence of its ending, the absence of narrative. There was no language. In the body, the mind, a mouth. Agape. I tried to write and every word foundered. Agony—I saw it. The dark inside, which I was and was not. The undone undid me. All night the leaving came.
November 5, 2025 at 9:35 PM
burgi.bsky.social
To me the book is a poetic dialogue though it's categorized as fiction, about the monstrosity of being given the choice to look away. The respobsibility not to? I keep being reminded of this book ever since I read it.
Cover of Savage Conversations, color drawing on green background: partial view of a hand held up in front of Lincoln, a shadow (not his) behind him Book description: May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of insanity. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln's claim that every night a Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. She is swiftly committed to Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Her hauntings may be a reminder that in 1862, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota in the largest mass execution in the United States history. No one has ever linked the two events--until now. Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former first lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.
November 5, 2025 at 3:37 PM
burgi.bsky.social
Yep, this branch is hanging from a spider's thread. Zoom in and see.
Threw in a rare pic of myself just because.
(At the Susquehanna River, Susquehanna SP, MD)
A small leafless branch hanging from almost bare branches over still, dark water which reflects clouds and sky, small islands, flotsam, and fall woods at the horizon. Woman (long hair, wearing pants sweater, and jacket, gray tones) at the same river's edge, standing on a rock, looking back and smiling. She holds her phone ready to take a picture
October 27, 2025 at 2:52 PM
burgi.bsky.social
"Last night I was oyster / whelmed and moored"
The poem Dream in Jameela F. Dallis' Encounters for the Living and the Dead, multi-layered and lusciously speaking to all senses. Another gem by @riverriverbooks.bsky.social 😍

📚💙
cover features a still life of a feast in oil on upper half: Cornelis de Heem, "Still-Life with Oysters, Lemons and Grapes" (1660s). The other half is covered by title in all caps with its first word covering the lower edge of the oil painting, on sienna-colored ground. Dream "Oysters are the answer."—M.F.K. Fisher, *Consider the Oyster* Last night I was oyster whelmed and moored in sound fed by cool Atlantic expanse gorged green, deep cupped, plump, and happy. I remember the time before when I was spat and sounds of banqueting shrimp lured me. Crackling like digital fire or hand-cut bacon a lover fries in cast iron the morning after, fearless and shirtless, humming some jaunty hymn. I knew I'd be safe—those pistoled shrimp speckled as magpie's eggs didn't burrow in waiting for me. And I didn't laugh at their cartoonish claw, something only a god or child would fashion. But did you know those asymmetric shrimp, those tiny beacons of delicious possibility, can shoot a bubble louder than thunder and hot as the surface of the sun? Well, almost as hot, but— for a night, I was oyster my ocean-worn shoulders whelmed and moored in sound fed by cool Atlantic expanse and now I am woman who dances in an emerald and schorl silk dress akin to Carolina green-gill oysters waiting for full moon.
October 22, 2025 at 10:27 PM
burgi.bsky.social
Some signs today 😊
Sign saying "no faux king way" and a crossed out crown above A sign in the middle of two others. It's in the design of a no parking any time sign and says: "no king anytime" with a bothsided arrow below and the warning "violators will be towed" A sign among flags (US and Palestine) with US Capitol in background. It says: "My frog suit is at the cleaner's" and "(but I came anyway)"
October 19, 2025 at 3:36 AM
burgi.bsky.social
This is what democacy looks like! No Kings DC.
Crowd with signs under clouds, in the sun Palestinian flags, Ukranian flag with US Capitol i background. People holding signs Sign on yellow and blue kufiya on lap. Sign reads: support freedom, not warcriminals. Free Palestine
October 18, 2025 at 10:10 PM
burgi.bsky.social
"We took notes on love, made gods of want."

From the play on the epigraph—"The text is a limited field of possible constructions" (Ricoer)—to the photos & the brilliant poems I love everything about E.G. Cunningham's FIELD NOTES 💖
@riverriverbooks.bsky.social hitting it out of the ballpark 😍

📚💙
the cover of Field Notes: a little over half features a color photograph of a wide and barren and undulating landscape in browns and brownish greens opening into an overcast and equally wide sky. Title fills lower half of the cover (gray on white) and bleeds slightly into the photo. The escape from suburbia was via history's fields. A childhood house went latent and invisible. Its green yard: a minor field framed by fences. Bells rang in wet season. To return meant doing battle with years. We took notes on love, made gods of want.
October 17, 2025 at 9:59 PM
burgi.bsky.social
This poem is from a delicious dialogue between Persephone and Jesus in Pádraig Ó Tuama's Kitchen Hymns (@coppercanyonpress.bsky.social, 2024). The part it's in is called "In a Garden by a Gate."
I love this book!
#poetry #bookSky 📚💙
For Such a Time as This Your mother said your father was a god, she said. Mine said that too, and I see what your god does. Abandons, tests, and traps you. Asks for more. And more. Then more than anyone is capable of doing. That is not divinity. That is a weak imagination. I'm beginning to agree, he said, but I don't believe he'd change. I'm talking about you, she said.
October 8, 2025 at 9:20 PM
burgi.bsky.social
An October haiku from way back for #smallPoemSunday, published by UCity Review (also way back).
The weather is as clear today as when I wrote this.
October Sun Glitter and sharpness sever sky from crowns today. No dulling the edge.
October 5, 2025 at 5:27 PM
burgi.bsky.social
I love how this poem expands a quiet moment.

Caribou Kitchen by Annie Finch in Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003)
Caribou Kitchen Most things have vanished while we were talking (the dents in a pitcher gleam by the gas lamp), but nothing is lost (cups in far corners). Arms still lean over the table (shadows on the oilcloth).
October 1, 2025 at 9:59 PM
burgi.bsky.social
This is what a @riverriverbooks.bsky.social mailday looks like
😍😍😍😍😍
📚💙💙💙
Two poetry books (Field Notes by E.G. Cunningham and Encounters for the living and the dead by Jameela F. Dallis) and two square-shaped, small broadsides, all arranged in an overlapping fashion, somewhat fanlike, on a wooden surface.
September 17, 2025 at 5:04 PM
burgi.bsky.social
If you were ever told to be wary of an accumulation of abstractions in poetry...
Jane Hirshfield in this week's New Yorker has an answer.
I Speak With Gravity To your left, the word gravid: the weight of new life. To your right, the word grave: place for putting a body once it's become only weight. Between them: existence, ambush of amazement, you. I pause. I look out my window. The big-leafed maple today looks back undecided. Some leaves wither brown, some keep green. For a tree, gravity is simple. A branch growing upward is neither hope nor resistance. A branch, growing downward is not surrender. One shape just becomes another. To find light, if it must, the whole trunk will twist. A tree doesn't grieve that gravity will soon enough sweep it all in. Before into after, existence's only offer. And yet, about time, gravity, you are silent. With your one, unchanging thought, what could you say? A musical note never changing goes unheard. My friend who is dying, still in you. I, still in you. Two leaves almost weightless —Jane Hirshfield
September 12, 2025 at 9:25 PM
burgi.bsky.social
That ending!! 🔥💖🔥 And this book! 😍
Hurry, there's still time to pre-order @hollicarrell.bsky.social's APOSTASIES from @perugiapress.bsky.social!!! 📚💙
cover shows a black & white image of Georgia O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz. The image shows her hands at rest in her lap and folded in a way that could suggest prayer. She wears a simple, white, short-sleeved shift. The image is a detail, not a full portrait. It is placed on the upper half of the cover, which is white. The title in black and author in gray are on the lower half Lot's Wife I imagine her in the moments before she glanced back, furious: sweat-slicked and sprinting, ash scattered over her gown and hair, hearing screams of the suffering bleating behind her; her only possession: a husband's name. I don't believe she looked back in longing for a home that was never hers. Did she understand, quick as thunder's whip, that she could not follow a man who offered her daughters thoughtlessly as water to a throng of thirsty lips? And who honors the terms of a tyrant god? At her back, the heat of the burning city, black smoke, loose golden sparks scalding her skin as she stops. Her neck the hinge, the bridge from body to mind, the tender place where the pulse beats.
September 11, 2025 at 8:17 PM
burgi.bsky.social
I love these flies, I love this poem, and I sure love Aracelis Girmay's #poetry! 🪰🪰💖🪰🪰
This poem is from GREEN OF ALL HEADS, her latest collection, about to come out @boa-editions.bsky.social
📚💙
When I come home they rush to me, the flies, and would take me, they would take me in their small arms if I were smaller, so fly this way, that way in joy, they welcome me. They kiss my face one two, they say, Come in, come in. Sit at this table. Sit. They hold one hand inside the other and say, Eat. They share the food, sit close to me, sit. As I chew they touch my hair, they touch their hands to my crumbs, joining me. The rim of my cup on which they perch. The milky lake above which. They ask for a story: How does it begin? Before, I was a child, and so on. My story goes on too long. I only want to look into their faces. The old ones sits still, I sit with it, but the others busy themselves now with work and after the hour which maybe to them is a week, a month, I sleep in the room between the open window and the kitchen, dreaming though I were the Sierra, though I were their long lost sister, they understand that when I wake I will have to go. One helps me with my coat, another rides my shoulder to the train. Come with me, come, I say. No, no, it says, and waits with me there the rest whistling, touching my hair, though maybe these are its last seconds on earth in the light in the air is this love, though it is little, my errand, and for so little I left my house again.
September 5, 2025 at 8:07 PM
burgi.bsky.social
Sunbreak by Emily Rosko in the latest @senecareview.bsky.social
🥰💖🥰
Sunbreak (by Emily Rosko) Morning before I can reach you, the meadow's ablaze with yellow, dew primes each leaf to a vital hue the sun manifests itself through chlorophyll, embedding light to cell. The air has this gentleness (it feels gushy to say so, but it is), as if the thin sheet of streaming time through which we are pinned is, for once, on our side, not carrying the news half-world away of toxins and melt, disorder and illness. Morning before I can reach you and there's this feeling of pause. The dog tips her ears to catch the ruckus of blue jays showing off their business high in the trees. And then neighbors emerge from their houses as the clock demands. Car engines start, the construction crews roll in to keep breaking ground. I don't know what this means but before I can reach you, already too much has happened, too much haste and erasure (before morning's reach, before I could ever hold your hand). The sun atop its arc, the leaves armored now. For last resort all the meadow can do is throw its injured shapes back with flaring color to the impervious noon.
September 3, 2025 at 7:13 PM
burgi.bsky.social
#SleepingInTheCourtyard, Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora (ed. by Holly Mason Badra, U Arkansas Press, 2025), a multi-genre #anthology, is such a wonderful source of inspiration for further reading! A gift!! 🌟💖🌟
📚💙 #bookSky
The cover of Sleeping in the Courtyard shows artwork by Shayan Nuradeen: female figures resting on their roof courtyard in a city, one of them looking up at the night sky, the other asleep on her side. The color palette is held in dark greens and blues mostly. All outlines in gold
August 29, 2025 at 10:18 PM
burgi.bsky.social
"an explosion to go"
The poem Delirious in Classic Crimes by @sjane.bsky.social, @sarabandebooks.bsky.social, 2025
A whole book of delightful explosions to go, in fact!
Sarah J. Sloat's work has been and continues to be such an inspiration. 🙏💙!

#vispo #poetry #bookSky 📚💙
collage-erasure-poem: text blacked out with black crayon, lifted words circled with pen, female figure in the lower right is composed of two incongruous parts (black & white photo and an illustration from a tailoring manual, possibly). She leans over what seems a toy airplane and something undefined in her hands. the words of the poem read: my little purse is a spiritual home to mystery an explosion to go Cover of Classic Crimes: a collage of collage pieces from individual poems placed on green ground
August 17, 2025 at 8:28 PM
burgi.bsky.social
Potential headshots? 😊
(in the Alps)
Headshot of elderly, white woman with shoulderlength, mousebrown hair, smiling. She wears a green blouse with round neck and mother-of-pearl button. Sun on her face, meadow in background Same woman, same outfit, barely smiling, wind in hair, three cows in background (blurry)
August 12, 2025 at 1:54 PM
burgi.bsky.social
Self-Portrait in I'm Always So Serious by @karismaprice.bsky.social (@sarabandebooks.bsky.social, 2023)!!
Breathtaking, literally and otherwise! The whole book, actually!
🌟✨🌟
#poetry #bookSky 📚💙
The cover of I'm Always So Serious shows an artwork by Delita Martin: "The Girl Inside," composed by using various techniques and materials. The piece covers nearly the entirety of the book cover: full-body, frontal portrait of a pouting Black girl in a white summer dress, her blue shadow/silhouette behind her, to her right, and another white silhouette of her to her left, seemingly in front because of the light/dark contrasts of the piece. There are dots, balls, and sphere-like shapes of various colors and solidity printed across everything. Self-Portrait after Chen Chen As happiness, As the wailing tambourine that replaced my uncle's gun, As the dancing it does when he waves it at the man who cut him off, As the rattle of pills in my father's hands to slow the multiplying cells, As me thinking something can be holy, As a pig, As a poem that doesn't mention the word father or water or drowned, As a lie as red as a crow's mouth, As a streetlight whose bulb never breaks, As a mother who has a child who's allowed to be nothing more than their age, As weeknight curfew, As reparations, As a new car, As a down payment, As the bay leaf inside the pot of red beans boiling on Mardi Gras day, As a Zulu coconut, As something so dark you have no other option but to call it precious, As a sibling, As a rotten tooth, As an aunt who has warmed the leftovers of our family before sundown, As whatever's left of my skeleton after the family pet has sucked the sorrow from every bit of my marrow.
July 13, 2025 at 10:10 PM