BCC Shines a Light On: Alexandra Burack

Name of the piece published by BCC: 

With Wormwood at the Craps Table

When/where was it originally published: 

My poem was originally published (in a slightly altered version) in The Bound Spiral (UK), Winter 1995/Spring 1996.

Tell us more about your piece! What is the background of the piece? What led you to write it? What’s your process?

As with most of my work, this poem was engendered in a moment of family crisis, but was intended, ultimately, to encode larger concerns with which others could empathize. Despite being the least financially-stable person in my extended family, I stepped up to care for my beloved maternal grandmother, Helen, who had suffered a serious fall and then a devastating stroke. Although she had lost everything—her home and lifetime of possessions—and was indigent, my numerous applications to secure her home-based nursing care were denied. So there she was, mostly bedridden, and there I was, indentured to numerous menial, part-time jobs that prevented me from spending all of my time with Nana as I deeply desired. And there was the healthcare system that could easily deny home-care benefits to a poor, elderly, disabled woman who’d sacrificed her entire life for her own family and the families of her siblings and grandchildren. A healthcare system that was built to protect profits, not people, in great part because politicians continued to believe the lie that a safety net for the most disadvantaged people encouraged laziness. If only her luck could change. And with that thought, the character of Wormwood, from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, suddenly appeared in my imagination, along with the scene of the poem, a craps table in a casino, where a poor unfortunate yearns for changed luck and Wormwood seizes upon a new deal for his boss.

Readers certainly recognize that what is “carried deep away” is not only the woman’s pain and suffering, but her soul, or put another way, her personhood. And this is how I hoped to signal that so much of what we think of as family history and luck swirls far beyond our individual choices, and in fact, is profoundly influenced by social forces whose control is kept out of reach of the average person. Wormwood’s power is fundamentally an ideological one: the power to manufacture a lie, sell a lie, and have people buy the lie. And when people can be easily brainwashed or seduced to believing a lie, this ideological strategy becomes a structural force of history.

How did you feel when it was first published and how have your thoughts or feelings on the piece changed from then to now? 

I was extremely honored that “With Wormwood at the Craps Table” was first published by The Bound Spiral, a highly respected UK literary magazine founded and edited by Mario Petrucci, the award-winning British-Italian eco-poet, with whom I was honored to work previously in London’s Blue Nose Poets collective, and to have had the opportunity to serve as an editor of his early work.

It is November 6, 2024 when I write this response to Bulb Culture Collective’s intriguing question about how my response to my poem may have changed. Although poets are supposed to be possessed of some degree of prescience, I honestly did not foresee how this poem, written and originally published in the mid-1990s, would strike me—on this brutally sad morning when fascism has succeeded in capturing the political mechanisms of American government—as being even more relevant in its allegorical warning about the power of propaganda than when I first wrote it. 

Is there a specific message you would like readers to take away from reading this piece? 

Firstly, I hope that readers appreciate the literary reference and that it sparks images in their own imaginations, as well as emotions, about the nature of luck and good fortune. I think the main emotional message is that fantasies of dire circumstances suddenly changed for the better are profoundly human, and serve, psychologically, to comfort us and assuage our fears and uncertainties in times of crisis and stress. The intellectual message, though, is that there is a danger to our freedom to be our genuine selves in trusting simple and immediate answers to complex and long-standing human and social problems, including poverty, illness, and injustice.

What else would you like to tell readers about your writing? (Doesn’t have to refer only to your BCC piece)

Although I’ve been honored and immensely fortunate to have had occasional opportunities to place my writing (mostly poems, but also literary criticism and academic writing) in front of the reading public over the past 45 years, I am just now, in my sixth decade of a writing life, finding consistent publication success. I’m not sure why so much of my work—written over the past 30 years especially—has struggled so to find resonance among editors, but I am profoundly grateful for the chances taken by well-read and aesthetically curious editors to publish my poems. I am also grateful there has been a sea change (though long overdue) in the terroir of contemporary American poetry, one that is more and more shaped by the qualities of the experiences of older women from all backgrounds. The Art and Craft of poetry has always been my way of having a conversation with living. As I wrote in a recent blog post on my website, when poems offer participation in a sensory and somatic experience to readers, poems enact empathy. Empathy is a path to understanding our place—as individuals in relation to our own thinking and creating, and as a human collective navigating how to relate to the planet and all its creatures (without harm, I might add). Poetry is an enactment of the unity among the human mind, human emotion, and the historical, contextual world in which human experiences are shaped. To ask of poetry that it continue to guide human beings in this unification is to require poetry to retain and strengthen its specific literary characteristics and qualities, and for us to demand that the most expansive panoply of voices in service to poetry be heard by the public. I’d like Bulb Culture Collective readers to know I remain firmly dedicated to the responsibility to continuously hone my mastery of the unique literary techniques of poetry to honor, simultaneously, the poetic tradition and the human truth of my experiences. 

Where can readers find more of your work? (Website/social media, etc)

I would be delighted to have readers visit my website, https://www.alexandraburack.com. And my social 

media handles are:

Facebook: search for Alexandra Burack

Bluesky: @aburack.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crwprof/