Avery Burns’ latest poem In the Margins is an accretive sequence dealing with the unmentionable. The poet actively resisted writing a poem following both surgery and later radiation treatment for cancer. As time passed, the initial push to write to poem came from a vivid dream conflating a faceless doctor discussing cells being “in the margin” post-surgery and a book on cancer simply titled One. The shadowy mimetic structure of the poem evidences the poet’s ongoing lyric preoccupations of minimalism and vocabulary restraint.

Drawings by Giulio Lacchini.