Reviews of Pennsylvania Collection Agency
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Burkard further emblazons the arc of theme and language that is beginning to coalesce into one of the most distinguishable formal and emotional landscapes in contemporary poetry. Idiosyncratic as always, this dazzling writer is never less than entertaining, but as poem is placed over poem, like some celestial template, one begins to feel the presence of much larger truths. All-encompassing, incendiary, immediate, and with a remarkable lyric gift, Burkard leads us to a place under the stars–as if for the first time–and what we find overhead is sublime.

–David Dodd Lee

Praise for Entire Dilemma (Sarabande, 1998)
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"Michael Burkard’s seventh collection of poetry, Entire Dilemma, gives off the spectral glow of alienation: life as envisioned by Jacqes Tati, T.S. Eliot, or Terry Gilliam. Burkard’s poems are lit from within, radiant but disturbing–as though the light by which we scrutinize our lives were capable of great harm. . . A dark whimsy complicates Entire Dilemma. We must read Michael Burkard's poems in the same way they were written–intuitively, sensing that they have been translated from a language we are not entirely fluent in, though we recognize the vocabulary."

–Dorothy Barresi, The Gettysburg Review

"The devastation of alcoholism and the loneliness of sobriety, the demands of death and memory and the challenges of language itself all find their way into Burkard's [new] collection, following 1990's diaristic My Sacred Boat. Poems like "The Summer After Last" brilliantly strike a balance between melancholy lyricism and Burkard's customary imagistic candor."

–Publishers Weekly