In a 1998 essay recently reprinted in his book Close Calls with Nonsense, critic Stephen Burt christened the “Elliptical school” of poetry, which encompasses writers prone to “hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory,” who “believe provisionally in identities (in one—or in at least one—‘I’ per poem),” but who, amid their “fast-forward and cut-up,” “suspect the I's they invoke." He grants only an elliptical mention to April Bernard, noting that he wishes he had room to quote her first volume, Blackbird Bye-Bye (1989). That book embraces a rhetoric of zig-zags, shifting swiftly from one image or sentiment to the next, featuring speakers and selves who flicker in and out of poems, intimate yet unidentifiable.
