Open Burning

by Christopher McCurry

Accents Publishing is proud to bring to you Christopher McCurry's first full-length poetry collection. Reality and dreams mesh in  Open Burning , detailing the fallout of a young couple's divorce. At times elliptical and surreal, the emotional and psychological landscape of these poems is punctuated by flashes of the real risks and rewards of navigating difficult times with grace and compassion. Through the magic of these well-crafted poems, we become invested in the seemingly inconsequential as well as the life-changing.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 15, 2020

About the author

Christopher McCurry grew up right outside of Lexington, Kentucky in the small town of Paris. In the seventh grade he entered one of his poems in a contest and won a medal. He's since lost the medal but still remembers the poem. His poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and featured on NPR's On Point as a Best Book of 2016 for his chapbook of marriage sonnets Nearly Perfect Photograph. A graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College and a high school English teacher, he spends his time playing board games, skateboarding, and going on adventures with his daughter Abra. In 2015, Christopher co-founded Workhorse, a publishing company and community for working writers. He believes everyone should write poems and that everyone can. You can find him online at christophermccurry.com or workhorsewriters.com.

Reviews

[Maggie Hess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christopher McCurry writes the cinematic, the tragicomic, the nightmarish in this collection of poetry, leading the reader through a dreamscape in which a man creates/reconfigures a family.

Open Burning will remind you of that feeling you get when you wake up and don't remember where you are; it will ask you to investigate the duties of love; it will sear its place into your memory with unabashed honesty and straightforward imagery.

Filled with plenty of pain ("Have you ever been the worst part of someone's life?"), it is also charged with purpose ("the man you want to be to this baby goat is the kind that's there every single one of those days"). McCurry's poetry endures the apocalyptic with a sense that to survive is to return to tenderness.

[Holly A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're looking for honest, high-quality poetry, then this is your book! McCurry's words resonate in our hearts and uncover depths that we didn't know our emotions could dig. These poetic wonders invite us to continue along his relatable, intimate journeys through personal heartache and self-revelation. These poems inspire. This collection is a gift for us all.

[Heather Dent · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book! It's the kind of book that inspires you to be a better writer. I've read and reread many of these poems. Some are devastating. Others joyful. And the best ones hit me at the core, pulling out a long forgotten memory or emotion and I see myself reflected back. Like this one.

IT WOULDN'T BE FUN IF THE PLANE DIDN'T CRASH

When I finally understood
you were reliving a memory
of your first time flying,
I watched your hand take off
and your mouth form
the percussion of engines.
Then, mid-flight, the airplane
turned into a helicopter
and the whomp of the blades
whirred from your lips as it crashed
like the many times you were
hoisted on my feet, and for fun,
suffered a similar tragedy.
I'm struck now, not by the power
or clarity of your recollection,
but how you told a story
and it was one of dying
and I had taught it to you.

[Autumn Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

astounding

I don’t even know what to say. Do you ever feel bad for reading something? Like you peaked too closely at something that wasn’t made for you? That’s how I feel. But it made me feel and that’s important.

[Linda Freudenberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book very raw and brave. Christopher revealed deep feelings of grief and pain with the ending of his marriage but also shared joy as he became a new dad to his daughter. His honesty and openness touched me.

[Dennis Preston · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Christopher McCurry’s Open Burning, the reader is thrust into the world of
separation and divorce . Like Pandora’s Box, the demons of anger, chaos,
disbelief, and bewilderment are unleashed. McCurry bares his own soul as three
poems share the title, “HOW IT FEELS WHEN YOUR WIFE LEAVES YOU.”
In yet another poem, he writes. “I am decades old pavement / having been trodden
on, beaten / down by rain. Hot then cold / and cracked and chipped . . .” I couldn’t
put the book down. It had its talons in me. I’ll read it again, and look for hope
in the bottom of the box.

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Open Burning is an honest, gut-wrenching, and beautiful depiction of a breaking marriage, love for a growing daughter, and survival through divorce. Chris’s writing is raw, with evidence of his bleeding heart on the page in front of you. Each poem will leave you feeling exposed and desperate for more.

[Karen George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christopher McCurry’s OPEN BURNING speaks of the gradual unraveling of a marriage alongside a father’s growing love for his young daughter. They are intimate and emotionally intense. I read the collection in one sitting, and it affected me deeply. I felt as if I’d been through an apocalypse along with the people that appear in these poems. McCurry examines the complexities of relationships—one ending and one deepening. These poems vibrate with longing, vulnerability, unflinching honesty, and tenderness. They’re threaded together with an intricate network of repeated, layered images that rivet you into the intense and unforgettable world he creates.

[Melissa Helton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection does my favorite things that poetry can do: 1. it simultaneously shows us the specificity of one human's experience and draws threads of connection to the reader and 2. it makes me see something in a new way. These poems take us through the familiar subject of love, heartache, desire, loss, and parenthood and they do so in a way that balances vulnerability / brashness, insight / ambivalence, and the grounded / the incorporeal. It's a hell of a collection.

[Venecia Proctor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Open Burning is raw and candid. That’s what makes this book so beautiful. McCurry captures the sweet and the difficult. There is nothing that he doesn’t touch and explore, which makes readers want to touch and explore aspects of their own lives.

[Chr*s Browning · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mostly unadulterated drivel, divorce poems meditating on how often the speaker made his ex-wife come, being desperately horny for baby sitters, and wondering how to care for a daughter when he can barely care for himself, written in a self-deprecating but nonetheless self-praising tone that mostly serves to portray the speaker as one of the men described herein: https://humanparts.medium.com/have-yo.... It's not a surprise that his wife asked him to stop writing poems about her if descriptions of taking his ring off to masturbate and chronic overuse of the word "sack" are all that he could come up with. There was a time when I thought I might one day become a writer or an English teacher at the least; having this man as a teacher stripped me of that desire, and I am deeply disappointed that he was promoted into the role of writing teacher for the arts program I once called home. It should come as no surprise that if you click the website link in his bio, it redirects to a page of Asian porn.

Edit 5/18/24: The website in question has been removed from his author profile. The rest stands.