Ox Lost, Snow Deep

by Alice Burdick

"I'm just going to break this, okay?" writes Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick in her sixth full-length poetry collection. The 14 long poems in Ox Lost, Snow Deep range from confessional narrative to collage to surrealism, exploring representations of history, both public and personal, and within that, they probe what is considered important and what is considered not important. These poems include takes on semi-rural existence, raising a family, and living in poverty. They also veer toward popular using movies, music, social media language as jumping-off points or simply by taking those media's forms. Burdick confronts the very embarrassment of simply being excruciation, apology, loss, humour, mistakes, and grief - and the freedom achieved by acknowledging these things.

Burdick's first collection of new poems since 2018, Ox Lost, Snow Deep will alter your ways of thinking and reading.

Alice Burdick is the author of five books of poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in multiple anthologies, chapbooks, folios, broadsides, cookbooks, and films. She leads workshops for children and adults, and is a mentor and freelance editor, proofreader, manuscript assessor, and broadcaster. She lives in Nova Scotia.

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 30, 2024

About the author

Alice Burdick lives and writes poetry in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. She shares a home with her husband and two young children. Alice moved to Halifax in 2002 from Toronto, Ontario, where she was born and raised. She has also lived in Espanola, Vancouver, and on the Sechelt Peninsula in BC.

Burdick has been involved with the small press community in Canada since the early 1990's, when she was co-editor, with Victor Coleman, of The Eternal Network. This very small ongoing imprint produced chapbooks, including several of her own works, such as Signs Like This, Fun Venue, and Voice of Interpreter. Her work has been published by other small presses in Canada, including: Proper Tales Press (a Time, My Lump in the Bed: Love Poems for George W. Bush); Letters Press (Covered); and BookThug (The Human About Us). It also has appeared in various magazines, such as Dig, Wat!magazine, subTerrain, fhole, This Magazine, and Who Torched Rancho Diablo? From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair. She has also done numerous readings over the years in many different venues, including the Ottawa International Writers Festival, The Scream in High Park in Toronto, and the Halifax Word on the Street.

Alice's third full-length collection, Holler, was released in April 2012 through Mansfield Press, which published her second collection, Flutter. Her poems have also appeared in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2005), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), and in Pissing Ice: An Anthology of 'New' Canadian Poets, (BookThug, 2004). Her frst perfect-bound book was Simple Master, published in 2002 by Pedlar Press.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone once told me poetry is good for the brain because of all its twists, its unexpected lateral movements and surprises. Alice’s poems do a lot of that while revelling in language, saying unusual things in unusual ways and giving a surrealist effect.

A few favourite stanzas:

The scale of representation
means what is small may appear
to disappear, but instead hides
in your lack of interest


It is always here,
Whatever it is. Haemoglobin
or enchanted underpants


I placed my hands into the sandbox.
There were sandboxes everywhere,
leading down into other dimensions.
Other dimensions were and are always possible.