What Burden Do Those Trains Bear Away ― A Memoir in Poems

In 1971-72, Kathleen Burgess hitchhiked through Mexico, Central and South America with a lover. These poems tell the story. They are hip, astute, sumptuous, simultaneously accessible and cultured , their hint of the classical journey spun with the unique dangers a woman faces on the road, which couldn't be more timely given recent issues of sexual abuse. Her lyric poems sing of the trek, of love, of time, place, and sensibility. Readers can identify with a young, nubile, daring young woman, indignant about injustice, hungry for the lilt of another language, new foods, and a culture so close yet so far away. The experience transcends the vicarious, in poems so lush, your body slides right in, and wither it goes, the mind and heart follow. Her poems, Chekhovian in their toggle between humor and struggle hardship and sensory opulence, revivify memories. It is no accident, in terms of the gist of the collection, that laughter at times averts tragedy. ?-Charlene Fix, author of Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat: Poems ===



Kathleen S. Burgess fashions the world of a couple hitchhiking from the United States into Mexico and then into South America: "From the mirage of puddle and sky, / a black Cadillac emerges. Pulls to the berm, / blows up a storm cloud of grit and sting." Burgess's poems delight and entertain and remind us of who we are as they herald a respect for the Journey. Hers is a book whose success comes in letting us ride shotgun on a bona fide adventure, one in which "Breezes spray us / in rainbows, rainbows dispersing the heat, the sting of home."

--Roy Bentley, author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City