"Burghardt’s poems have the sense of the lyric journal entry, sketching across the immediate and recollected, of a particular weaving through the dailyness of domestic life, although constructed less on the activity itself than utilizing the details of those days to speak to something more abstract. . . There is such an ease to these poems, deceptively so; as well as an underlying quickness, anxiety and easy humor, able to poke the occasional self-jab. These are poems that sit exactly where the authors sits, as he is sitting there, and you, the reader, there also."

Periodicities

"Great philosophical questions sometimes take the simplest forms. What one thinks of as 'ordinary' in a human’s life is anything but ordinary. Like the great poems of Michael Burkard or Ralph Angel, these poems of sound-alike Burhgardt spin from humble origins of small events on mind-waves into pure spill. They are cerebral at the same time as being very deeply felt, nearly sentimental; they captivate the mind as well as hear and reading them sends me on my own inner journey through time and space and all the far or nearly forgotten moments of my own ordinary life."

Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water

"The continuously solid knit between lines keeps the reader of (no subject) somewhat breathless. The nouns are bathed in the luminous light of the everyday and the landscape underneath the poetry rolls along in time with its cosmic american music. 'I exercise echo beyond the neighbor’s pastel stucco and am similarly peeled back by the sun.' I felt a slight sonnet like cradling at work in this book. In fact, these perfectly weighted orchestrations are still dripping down the highways of my mind. There are goodbyes lingering at every corner and miniature librettos performed under heartbroken street light. The mood and phrasing pull equally hard to the point that I’m not sure which parts are magic and which are sleight of hand. I only know that I want back into this fading, crystalline world immediately."

Cedar Sigo, author of All This Time

"In these terse lyric meditations on the lightness of modern being, poems that veer toward and shy away from epigrammatic certainty, Peter Burghardt reports on what it means to embrace an ethos of responsibility without congealing into the fixtures of ideology ('you can’t choose something into truth, / like you can into concept'). The trappings are real, from epistemological pathos ('You got old enough to recall the shape/ of what you couldn’t remember') to existential dread ('a house is a special kind of box I spend/ my time in though I guess what adds up/ is always some kind of container/ punctuated by the vastness/ of the packaging.'). And Burghardt, like many of us, is not immune to the allure of 'online retail therapy' ('even though I’m running out of want/ the want waits for me'). Still, (no subject) offers its readers the real possibility of a future inasmuch as 'The hope of a moment/…stands apart from its birth.' And that hope is inseparable from Burghardt’s reminder that 'What was once destroyed/ is green today.'"

Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ