Dinosaur Bones

Dinosaur Bones collects poems written by Michael Burke over his career as an acclaimed visual artist. Many of these poems tell a story. "I Made A List" travels from Mabel's breast to a 10,000-foot-high observatory In Hawaii, to the deepest point in the ocean. A love poem begins on Ninth Avenue and ends in a St. Petersburg concert hall during the summer solstice. Others can be light-hearted and humorous, such as "Caterpillars Don't Write Poems," "Beetles Beware," and "Sex Is Silly." Others are profoundly speculative. Burke's background as an astronomer often comes into play with poems that link everyday thoughts with Einstein's theories or quantum mechanics. Burke says of his poems, "I draw landscapes, vanishing points shift, consistent with the probabilities that remain of our once precise science." Dinosaur Bones invites readers to share the trials, successes and humor of a widely varied life. The collection is illustrated with Burke's own drawings.

Michael Burke has traveled through a number of careers since he graduated from college. The first was as an astronomer, working at observatories in the U.S., Hawaii, and Iran. He then went back to school to obtain a Master's Degree in City Planning. He worked in New York City's Planning Department and later became an Assistant Professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture and City Planning. Michael changed direction again when he found a loft in Soho and began to paint. He has been an artist for more than thirty years-painting, drawing, and lately producing aluminum books and sculpture. He has exhibited his work extensively in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. As a fiction writer, Michael is the author of the Johnny "Blue" Heron mystery-adventure trilogy, consisting of Swan Dive (2009), Music of the Spheres (2011), and Out of Mind (2014).