Burnside Soleil

“Berceuse Parish is an instant classic. Funny, tender, profound, and absolutely goddamn brilliant—here are poems to study and love, lines that will charm you and leave a resounding ache. Burnside Soleil has created a piece of literature that has everything I love about a great book of poems, plus many things I love about a great novel. I can’t think of the last time I encountered a poetry collection that felt, on the whole, this originally conceived and winsomely rendered. I want to thrust this gift of a book into the hands of everyone I know.”

—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat

“In his first book, Burnside Soleil inhabits a myth that is almost real, of family, of friends, living and departed, and of the Acadian culture in Louisiana. Soleil’s brilliant, close-grained and perfectly worded lyrical portraits are enlarged by the historical and cultural context of a second curatorial narrator, Gus Babineaux. Soleil’s transcendent accomplishment is to break the heart and restore it to laughter with redemptive irony. Look elsewhere for promise. Berceuse Parish is all there now, and it is a masterwork.”

—Rodney Jones, author of Alabama and Elegy for the Southern Drawl

Buy through Basket Books, Blue Cypress Books, and elsewhere.

Latest Reviews

Largehearted Boy / “Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish is one of the most ambitious poetry collections I have read in years, a book that almost magically paints a crisp and empathetic portrait of a community.”

Caroline Fairey Meese / “Berceuse Parish is equally fabulist and sincere, a rare combination.” 

Daniel Lassell / “With its strong musicality and muscular language, Berceuse Parish is so skillfully executed that it reads more like a fifth book of poems rather than a debut collection.”

Francois Bereaud / “This reviewer’s inability to adequately describe the work only speaks to its sparkling originality and depth.”

Lee Rossi / “Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish is a delight for every reader who values the American language’s multiplicity of regions and registers.”

David Baker / “It’s the Cajun bayou of Louisiana, and the language is charged with idiom and fancy, sorrow and remembrance, with footnotes, libations, a history of English ‘nature poetry’ and a legion of ‘quixotic journeys.’ I hear Faulkner alongside Atsuro Riley, a touch of Madeleine Peyroux next to Christine Balfa. The poems are shapely, surprising, vigorous, and feel as real as ‘a roux—the tang of home.’”