
	Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia

Alice Burdick

Photo by Zane Murdoch

Alice Burdick lives and writes poetry in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. She shares a home with her husband, Zane Murdoch, and daughter, Hazel Paisley Murdoch. Alice moved to Halifax in 2002 from Toronto, Ontario, where she was born and raised. She has also lived in Espanola, Vancouver, and on the Sechelt Peninsula in BC.

Burdick has been involved with the small press community in Canada since the early 1990's, when she was co-editor, with Victor Coleman, of The Eternal Network. This very small ongoing imprint produced chapbooks, including several of her own works, such as Signs Like This, Fun Venue, and Voice of Interpreter. Her work has been published by other small presses in Canada, including: Proper Tales Press (a Time, My Lump in the Bed: Love Poems for George W. Bush); Letters Press (Covered); and BookThug (The Human About Us). It also has appeared in various magazines, such as Dig, What!magazine, subTerrain, fhole, This Magazine, and Who Torched Rancho Diablo? From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair. She has also done numerous readings over the years in many different venues, including the Ottawa International Writers Festival, The Scream in High Park in Toronto, and the Halifax Word on the Street.

Alice's second collection, Flutter, was released in Fall 2008 through Mansfield Press. Her poems have also appeared in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2005), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, an anthology of surrealist Canadian poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), and in Pissing Ice: An Anthology of 'New' Canadian Poets, (BookThug, 2004). Her first perfect-bound book was Simple Master, published in 2002 by Pedlar Press.

You can find reviews, updates and purchasing information at http://www.mansfieldpress.net/index.htm.

Reviews of Flutter:

"Each of her poems, each of her publications, read like graceful, understated and powerful creations; why are the appearances of her books not treated more like events?" - rob mclennan (rob mclennan's blog)

"Her lines are deceptively elementary, but it’s not simplicity they produce, but
complex comprehension...maybe it’s Farewell to Nova Scotia— that weepy anthem — replicated as jaded, irony-rich verse. Don’t matter if it is: it is very good." - George Elliott Clarke (The Chronicle Herald)

"Burdick's unique, and odd, and very compelling...Along with their interesting and gorgeous material wordplay, these poems are stuffed and spinning with confident references to small story: of parenting, of small town social mores, of walking and smelling air and identifying the missing cosmopolitan tapestry of big city life...She's found a whiptart voice that points out the palpable natural world while insisting on the individual's right to lament and witness the problems conscious living brings." - Margaret Christakos (ARC POETRY MAGAZINE)

Reviews of Simple Master:

"This Pedlar Press collection of poems by Alice Burdick is called her "first book". while this is her first 'bigger collection', there has always been a small mob of fans clamouring for any Burdick, she is just one of those whose poems work into people…and shadows crawl around this book everywhere. love and death, the gains and losses of this stuff - real life stuff - collected into poetry of observation and language play."
-Daniel f. Bradley (Word magazine)

"A surprising new voice is hard to come by in poetry, particularly for a first book. Alice Burdick, however, has chanced on an idiom, rhythm and attitude that genuinely catch us off guard. Her debut, Simple Master, somehow manages to amalgam aspects of Sylvia Plath, Stevie Smith and John Ashbery into a lyricism that is unsentimentally fierce, energetically unpredictable and full of ingenious obliquities. Frankly, I'm not sure what sleight-of-hand Burdick is using to make these wily and eccentric poems work - these poems that try to "Tackle the air/with air" - but right now, it's enough that they do."
-Carmine Starnino

"Humorous, surreal, and sad, Simple Master investigates the interweaving of individual memory and collective history, along the way continually proposing new ways of viewing the world. On one level, which is never entirely absent from even her most radical poems, Alice Burdick gathers up the elements of perception in a sophisticated and beautiful lyrical mode."
-Lance La Rocque (The Drunken Boat magazine)

"Fortunately the anarchic third-millennium talent, the young Torontonian Alice Burdick, has come along to redeem, destroy and re-create all the nation's sub-Plathness, with her high-intensity debut, Simple Master… in tone, emotion, and sheer visual punch, Burdick's poems speak a language that's whole, intelligible and yet brand new."
-Lyle Neff (subTerrain Magazine)

"I often find her more wildly associative poems less successful than the more straightforward technique of others, but I'm more willing to forgive-and more able to enjoy, moreover-her obliquities than those of many elliptically difficult poems because there's so much kinetic energy here, even in the least of her verse; because there is a deep emotional, intellectual and political engagement in her work that makes her techniques resonate as a necessary individual expression rather than merely frivolous experimentation." -Zach Wells (Bookninja Magazine)