D Nurkse

Dennis Nurkse is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently, A Country of Strangers (Knopf, 2022). He is the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Whiting Writers Award, and prizes from the Poetry Foundation and the Tanne Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001. His work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Estonian, and other languages. In 2011, a re-issue of Voices over Water, an earlier collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best book of poetry published in the U.K. A British edition of A Night in Brooklyn is forthcoming from CB Editions, London. Nurkse’s work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement(UK), The Guardian (UK), Poetry London (UK), The Hudson Review, the Los Angeles Times, and other venues. Nurkse has also written on human rights and was elected to the board of Amnesty International-USA for a 2007-2010 term. He has taught poetry at Rikers Island Correctional Facility, as well as at MFA programs at Rutgers, Brooklyn College, and Stonecoast. He currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Note on Poetics

When I was young, I loved poetry, but I thought the real work of the world was done by real people, teachers, nurses, social workers, cooks, coal miners. But the older I get, the more real poetry seems. We are a deeply irrational species, helpless against our own convictions. We all know the righteous person driven mad by their own righteousness, the mystic who can’t forgive, the destructive lover. Poetry allows us breathing room for our divided selves. A poem plays with meaning, rather than injecting it. A poem observes the world, observes itself observing, and is free to self-contradict. The 19^th century American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson might have had this in mind when he wrote, “Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet…”