Alice Burdick's Ox Lost, Snow Deep

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Anvil Press, 2024)

​Give me music, a chance
to breathe, to hear beyond
the blood rushing in my ears.
(“Great Village sequence”)

​I’m finishing the book on Good Friday, sitting at the Art House Cafe, drinking my invented blend of lapsang tea and peach rooibos, which I call “smoky peach.” A vocalist sings Careless Whisper by George Michael in the other room. Alice Burdick extols me to hold to rhythm, and I do. Her staccato and smooth rhythms in this book have me enthralled.
 
I loved ox lost, snow deep. It is full of subversions of fixed expressions and ideas, knock-your-socks-off observations and quirky aphorisms, which I want to put on t-shirts and wear proudly but it’s so fucking cold in April, I have to layer up.
 
There is a luxury to the long poem form. It is a suitcase that you can fit anything into, and these thirteen poems of sequences and cycles do that, but are exquisitely minimal, compact, a string of gleaming jewels. On a recent poetry walk, Cameron Anstee was talking about the tension of minimalism, how poets try to get away with removing stuff and can overdo it if they aren’t careful. Not a word is wasted here. That’s skill.
 
These are such wise, funny and strange poems, it’s hard not linger on a line or a bit of word play or a startling image. I devoured the book on first read and then returned to some of my favourite bits. The reinvented aphorisms are so wise, we should know them already. These should be commandments on stone tablets and acerbic telegrams.
 
I am fascinated with how Burdick plays with and extends some of the tropes of Canadian surrealism, such as syntactic and conceptual reversal (“Water distinctly reads/and tells a place” [“Great Village sequence”];  “Fog opens the door”  [“Foglit sequence”]); the personification of objects (“A rusty penny of time sends tender regards” [“Great Village Sequence”]); and collaged lists like sculptural readymades (“Wizards tilt/ levitating mood lamps. Fire extinguisher, /lamp, nor’easter” [“Suspenseful demographics”]) Burdick punctuates the poems with brilliant observations, self-deprecation, and play with repetition. In the title poem, for example we have:

The snow is so deep / I can’t find my soul.
The snow is so deep / I will stop working.
The snow is so deep, / sound is a thread hanging loose.
The snow is so deep / and will not work.
Deep snow is scheduled for the past.
("Ox Lost, Snow Deep")

See how she repeats and changes, adds gorgeous imagery and boom! She changes things, changes time. It’s ingenious.
 
In this poem several concepts are integrated within a web of repetition and accumulation, including the serious and the silly, which leads to this: “Snow is silly, so serious.”
 
Burdick delights in these contrasts. She makes strange and she resists aboutness with her constant remixing: “A room leads into a room leads into a room”. A word leads into a word leads into a word, a world, a whirred.
 
Ox. snow. thread. light. : a circle of repeated words that accumulate, switch places, dance.
 
There’s humour here too, and it comes with a bottle of wry: 

How many perimenopausal poets
does it take to think of a word?
(“Great Village sequence”)

Speaking of words, Burdick challenges pedantic uses of language and literalist attitudes toward meaning:

What are words.
Here they climb into gilt picture frames
(“Great Village sequence")
 
//
 
Meaning comes from experience.
Anyone conversely can think anything meaningless,
including another’s creations, but
that doesn’t mean these creations have no value”
 
If all you want is meaning,
just try to stay alive
​(“Shut Down sequence”)

​I particularly love the subversion of expressions:

Grasping at snobs / slobs
Hope threads eternal
Fortune abhors a vacuum
(“Great Village sequence”)

​And I love the way she addresses and messes with convention, nostalgia and the binary or the simple. “No rules except/ for rules,” Burdick writes in “Big Trouble in Little China Trouble”:

The world
is not simple. I know people.
We have our habits.
(“Great Village sequence”)
 
//
 
my demands / were simple: you may enter only
if you tell me something interesting
Practice memory to release it into air
(“Practise”)
 
//
 
Everyone lives in a graphed sequence
of shaped lines.
​(“The archived neighbourhood”)

​Burdick tells us something interesting every time.  I get the impression that she is operating under her own set of rules/constraints and then disrupting the constraint in some way.
 
With sudden bursts of word play (“a tapestry of tapeworms” [“Suspenseful demographics”]; “You don’t know jackshit about jugulars, jackboots down fevered halls” [“Brine”]), Burdick breaks free from preprogrammed, fixed, and conventional ways of looking at the world. She fucking sings.
 
I’ve dog-eared the entire book and starred every astute observation, every wild word instance of word play, every image that makes me go wow or ahhhh or smile bitterly in recognition:

Enough with the metaphors--
these are actual puffy jackets
(“Suspenseful demographics”)
 
//
 
Grasp the future between your teeth
and I’ll pull the harness tighter
(“Practise”)

​Burdick is one of the poets collected in a cherished anthology, Surreal Estate, 13 Poets Under the Influence (The Mercury Press, 2004), edited by Stuart Ross, also the editor for ox lost, snow deep. In his introduction to the anthology, he talks about the contributors as embracing “the possibilities of randomness, absurdism, chance, error and the unconscious” as being “happily out of step.” Yet for me, Burdick and her surrealist compatriots are exactly in step with my oddnik relationship to poetry and to life. “The thing is,” Alice Burdick likes “to be silly.” Alice Burdick likes “to be serious” (“Ox lost, snow deep”). I do too. In fact, I’m serious about my silliness and silly about seriousness.
 
I had the pleasure of hearing Burdick read at VERSeFest here in Ottawa last autumn and she blew me and the rest of the audience away on a stage at Red Bird Live, a space where audiences are mesmerized by music. This was a chance for us to be mesmerized by badass, brilliant poetry. You’re going to read the book quickly the first time, it has a sense of urgency, but read it again, slowly, and let each intelligent and playful line sink in.  As Burdick writes, 

My community is not exactly local,
but localized in art, love, and ideas.
Neighbours in thought.
​(“Great Village sequence”)

​I am so glad we are neighbours and in the same community.

---

Amanda Earl (she/her) does creative stuff from the 19th floor of her Chinatown apartment in Ottawa on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Her most recent publication is the collaborative poem the suitcase poem with a bunch of poets, published by above/ground press. You can be her client for editing, mentorship, literary event organizations and customized workshops. AmandaEarl.com.