Troubler

by Elijah Burrell

“In Elijah Burrell’s second collection of poems, the past and present echo off each other in visions occasioned by the visitations of the shape-shifting form of the titular Troubler. As Troubler ‘gives notice,’ the poems themselves provide the reader with a different kind of noticing—attention to the specificities of both image and vernacular, sustained looking and satisfying turns of phrase. Infused with music and memory, Troubler complicates our assumptions about coming of age, rendering it a process that reverberates in us long into the life, love, and loss of adulthood.”
—Dora Malech, author of Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean

“As inventive in its form as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and as trenchant in its emotion as the poems of Donald Hall and Robert Hass, Elijah Burrell’s Troubler leaves its lucky reader in hushed, grateful awe. The poems engage their subjects—faith and suffering, love and loss, youth and mortality—with clear-eyed empathy and gorgeous language. Each one is an invitation—to think, to feel, to remember that you’re alive.”

—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This and director of the Michener Center for Writers

“Elijah Burrell’s second collection is a tour de force in both its overarching conception and its granular detail. One minute, as the book ‘musters me skyward,’ I’m mulling its big spiritual questions or its apt organizational trope of the double LP. Next minute, I’m back down in the roadside mallow, delighting in phrases, anecdotes, unforgettable characters. One such character is the collection’s namesake, Troubler. An irresistible mystagogue, he moseys in and out of these poems like a lost angel from Flannery O’Connor’s heaven. Troubler augurs the loss of the protagonist’s mother, and the book’s closing movements reckon with her illness and eventual death. Later on, from ‘the far darkness,’ she returns in everyday sights and sounds. The mother now lives in the son’s imagination. Thanks to the power of this poetry, she lives in the reader’s too.”

— Greg Brownderville, author of A Horse with Holes in It

“As measured and rapturous as any work of art that expresses profound awe and gratitude, Elijah Burrell’s Troubler opens out into the most luminous spaces of understanding as both a kind of reckoning and resurrection. I turn to intimate poetry of this kind—speech-laden, vivid, and expansive—to remind me of the ordinary pleasures of memory and song.”

— Major Jackson, author of Roll Deep and poetry editor at Harvard Review

84 pages, Paperback

Published July 30, 2018

About the author

Elijah Burrell is the author of three collections of poetry: Skies of Blur (EastOver Press, 2024), TROUBLER (Aldrich Press, 2018), and The Skin of the River (Aldrich Press, 2014). His writing has appeared in publications such as AGNI, The Hopkins Review, North American Review, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Sugar House Review, Measure, and many others. Burrell received the 2010 Jane Kenyon Scholarship at Bennington College, where he earned his MFA in Writing and Literature at Bennington’s Writing Seminars. In 2012 Burrell joined the faculty of Lincoln University, where he serves as Professor of English.

Reviews

[Alyse Bensel · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reading as part of the 2019 #SealeyChallenge) 3/31

I admire how much this collection reads like an expansive novel, with the speaker and the character of the Troubler occupying much of the poems' central tensions. The powerful opening poem, and some more loosely tied to the narrative scattered throughout the collection, helped build the world in which humor, loss, family, and love take center stage.