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Reviews
“In Burn, Jeanne d’Arc’s
familiarity swerves radically from body-in-flame to a restlessly
questioning interior life—a profound and contemporary meditation
wherein Patrick Pritchett laminates his own voice to Joan’s,
struggling (for both) with the forcible claims of ‘King’
and obedience vs. the radiant uncertainties of angel, fire and
error. Brilliantly circuitous and exquisitely pitched, these poems
unfold the possibility of an unboundary’d life where uncommonness
leads to ‘swimming with God.’”
— Kathleen Fraser
“A stunningly lyrical consideration of Joan of Arc, the intricacies
of her belief and her fate — in Patrick Pritchett’s
words, this becomes a meditation on belief itself and its power
over fate. His language spirals outward, as its sounds hold it
in, and at its center, a marvelous woman comes out of myth to
be simple and solid and certain. He resists the drama and goes
straight for the strangeness, for ‘the radiant dial of the
skull.’”
— Cole Swensen
“Patrick Pritchett’s Burn is an incantation where To
be called is to be split apart. The act of invoking is equally
the act of dismantling. Hearing the call is a re-cognition that
obliterates first cognizance. Ancient biblical texts describe
a form of “devotion” in which a place, its goods, even
its population, are given so fervently to God as to be utterly
destroyed. In this book, Pritchett practices a kenosis (self-emptying)
that resounds of a devotion ‘orphaned/into nomination/beyond
all care.’”
— Elizabeth Robinson
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