About this book
While the poems in this collection are inspired by the story of Fievel Mousekewitz, the cartoon mouse of the author’s childhood, they are gut-wrenching in their examination of the American dream. Fievel’s family history—and the author’s—is one of a Jewish family immigrating from the Old World to the New and eventually being pulled across the plains: “When migrant boys looked west in leather hats, their slang pierced with Polish accents.” Even though “tomorrow is made of rocks and time; is the draft that sweeps sleepily through the fallen branches,” it is also where immigrants “watch their dreams decompose on plywood” as they search “for whatever it is that makes men free.”
Using the story of Fievel, Burt plays masterfully with the ambivalence of hope and cynicism, as if he had traversed the ocean and the continent westwards himself: “I am the hope that has not been forgotten, because I declare myself welcome here, as if there is nothing in history I will not make mine.”
Advance Praise
“Andrew Burt’s poetry magnifies the vanishingly small line between danger and safety. This collection asks whether order is an illusion that veils chaos, or vice-versa, travelling the world and bridging time and tone, juxtaposing images from the Bible with animated films. The poems search for answers—from nature, from dreams, from human connection—and often conclude that the only answer is to surrender to forces beyond anyone’s control . . . I stopped underlining lines in this poetry collection when I realized that I was underlining every page.”
—Ari Shapiro, host of NPR’s All Things Considered
“Andrew Burt’s Poems for a Cartoon Mouse gives voice to the underside of the American-Jewish symbiosis in a light and playful style, worthy of Ecclesiastes. His poetry softens no edges, sweetens no puzzles, dispels no darkness, and yet it dazzles.”
—Rabbi James E. Ponet, Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain, Emeritus, Yale University
About the Author
Andrew Burt lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two sons. This is his first book of poetry. He is the author of American Hysteria (2015: Lyons Press)
"Departing Shostka, Russia"
It would be foolish to leave in this
Storm, where one can’t even see where
One is going—but I will.
Take Lot
Walking. Take Lot walking with his
Back turned to the world, and his eyes
Forward.
Now, take
The snow moving down to earth, and
The silence as it falls, slowly,
For falling’s sake.
"Ellis Island Pigeons"
Call it a disease
Your flying:
Each moment
Is a movement
Forward, a nose-
Dive out of the
Past. I think of
Movere, like the
Third person,
Singular form
Of trading one
Place for one
Other. Or of
Momentum, as
In moving for
Moving’s sake.
Therefore, hold
Me tight and
Let the endless
August nights
Pass. Allow me
The unrelenting
Smoothness of
Your skin. And
Above all do
Not let me fly.
Stand me still
So that I never
Trade one mo-
Ment for the
Next, just for
Moving’s sake.
"Instructions For What To Do Upon Losing Your Family"
Prayer
Call yourself lucky. You are alive and fifteen thousand blades of grass bend under the wind in the city park beside you. Some reflect the beams of the rising sun. Think: your mother did not die in childbirth. Nor did your immigrant ship sink on the elbows of the Atlantic as the gray clouds swiped at its mast. Forget your hunger and call this perspective. Find something to thank. Call each gratefulness a prayer.
