Rick Bursky was born and raised in New York City. Immediately following high school he spent four years as a paratrooper in the army. College would follow, earning Bursky a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His first full-length collection of poems, The Soup of Something Missing, was published by Bear Star Press (2004) after winning the Dorothy Brunsmen Poetry Prize. Hollyridge Press published his chapbook, The Invention of Fiction. He has twice been nominated for a Puchcart Prize and his poems have appeared in many journals including American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Southern Review, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, and New Letters. Bursky works in advertising and teaches poetry at UCLA Extension. He lives in Los Angeles.

Books by Rick Bursky:

Other poems on the web by Rick Bursky:
"The Collections"
"The Geography of Exile"
Two poems

Rick Bursky's Website.

Rick Bursky's Blog.

Rick Bursky on Twitter.

About Death Obscura:

"Rick Bursky is a master of dark improbabilities and essential strangeness. His poems lead askew alleyways of situation, feeling, and thought to what is original, unparaphrasable, and revelatory in these poems and our lives."
—Jane Hirshfield

"Death Obscura is a spectacular achievement. By turns elegant and ironic, extroverted and gazing fully inward, funny and heartbreaking, Rick Bursky's voice is pitch-perfect. His work hypnotizes and shocks us at the same time. For years I have come to his poetry looking for inspiration because he is a master craftsman­­—but, even more importantly, he is a poet who is never afraid to abandon a plan for a true epiphany or a stunning image. His poems overflow with those. Rick Bursky is one of our best poets, and the poetry in Death Obscura is his best work yet."
—Laura Kasischke

"Rick Bursky is one of the more distinct voices in contemporary poetry. At once mystical and literal, satirical and romantic, inventive and accessible, his poems move seamlessly between realities and levels of human experience. There is a kind of sober wit at work in his poetry, a lyrical witness of the imagination, and a genius at unveiling the interplay between fact and fiction, imagination and reality, the ordinary and the surreal. I find myself reading his poems over and over again, amazed by the revelation of the way a mind reflects on a mind. And on the beauty and insights offered by each reflection."
—Nin Andrews