For the "Contributor’s Marginalia" section of 32 Poems, poet Zeina Hashem Beck offers her reading of Ricky Bursky's poem "This is Yours" from I'm No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance.

Praising Bursky's verse, Beck claims that this poem "immediately flirts with and involves you, the reader. And what is it, you find yourself asking, that the poem’s speaker is about to offer you? The truth, and lies, and it doesn’t matter which."

The review continues: "Now I don’t know about you, but a love poem that starts with blurring the lines between reality and illusion has already won me over...The beauty of this poem partly lies in the way it negotiates and brings together what might seem contradictory: humor and hurt, reality and illusion, truth and lies, private and public, and even persona and reader."

Beck concludes with a meditation on the final lines of the Bursky's poem: "I love how the poem reverts again to the reader in the end, making him/her storyteller . . . the persona is still flirting with you, still there, playing, asking, offering no answers, no definitions."

Click here to read the complete piece from 32 Poems.

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