TheVITALSYSTEM Format: Paperback

The Vital System is the first published book by a poet already setting off sparks among readers across the globe. In these poems, the body is always at stake ― vulnerable ― and the poet dares to try and illuminate what she has called “the protective capability of violence.” Burroughs’s compression of phrasing, subverted syntax, and ability to release a story through cinematically sequenced images allow her to expose particular tensions that are gendered and racial as well as essentially human.

CM Burroughs was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and earned degrees from Sweet Briar College and the University of Pittsburgh. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Idyllwild Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, and Callaloo Writers Workshop, and both the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Warhol Museum have commissioned her to create poetry in response to art installations. She lives in Chicago where she is the Elma Stuckey Emerging Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College.