Then Go On

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Cross-Genre. "The formal inventiveness of Mary Burger's writing in part derives from her questioning of received ideas but also from the sheer pleasure she seems to take in following what the sentence can do within the 'as-yet as-ever still-undetermined space between send and receive.' The attempt in these poems-in-prose, which are also essays or essay-like poetic inventions, is critical (as in critique and crucial): to make more real what is covered over and abstracted, not by simplifying but activating the thinking writer's experience of those cultural, philosophical, scientific, and social logics that imagine their target audiences ('us') to be objects merely of affirmation and compliance."--Carla Harryman"The mind at work in Mary Burger's THEN GO ON is by turns exacting, passionate, tuned in to matters of scale as well as the functional paradox ('It is possible she was one of those who could steer the correct course only when she believed navigation was impossible'), and wholly unremitting in its drive to 'verify the veracity of perception.' These qualities are made active through the precision and clarity of Burger's sentences, which are always situated in the present, and which can cut through one's given layers of belief with an oddly deliberate (sensitive) quickness. No other writing I know right now has such unadorned focus. Reading THEN GO ON has me reconsidering my notions of what certain surfaces--that of a person, a social identity, a piece of writing--can be."--Anselm Berrigan