With an informed awareness of its own intertextuality – from American gunslingers and the Blues to the landscape of the Midwest – Wax wanders through the concrete and the abstract, language and idea, the patterned and the primordial. At once urgent and ecstatic, and always politically engaged, Burnette’s intricate collection is, above all, a celebration of the infinite ways that humans reform their world.

"These are poems infused with the spirit of the blues, with the American Midwest, with a friction that bristles between expansive journeys and the ending of things. Immensely readable and enjoyable poems that transported me somewhere else entirely." — Andrew McMillan