Alice Burdick lives and writes poetry in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Alice moved to Halifax in 2002 from Toronto, Ontario, where she was born and raised. She has also lived in Espanola, Vancouver, and on the Sechelt Peninsula in BC. She is a poet, essayist, and cookbook author who also edits, proofreads, does manuscript evaluations, and leads workshops for adults and children.
Burdick has been involved with the small press community in Canada since the early 1990’s, when she was co-editor, with Victor Coleman, of The Eternal Network. This very small ongoing imprint produced chapbooks, including several of her own works, such as Signs Like This, Fun Venue, and Voice of Interpreter. Her work has been published by other small presses in Canada, including: Proper Tales Press (a Time, My Lump in the Bed: Love Poems for George W. Bush); Letters Press (Covered); and BookThug (The Human About Us). It also has appeared in various magazines, such as Hava LeHaba (from Tel Aviv, Israel), Event Magazine, Canadian Poetries, Two Serious Ladies (from the US), Dig, What!magazine, subTerrain, fhole, This Magazine, and Who Torched Rancho Diablo? From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair. She has also done numerous readings over the years in many different venues, including the VerseFest Ottawa, Ottawa International Writers Festival, The Scream in High Park in Toronto, and the Halifax Word on the Street. She co-owned the former Lexicon Books in Lunenburg from 2014 to 2020, where she organized and promoted readings and events, including Lexicon Salons, where poets and musicians collaborated.
Her sixth book of poetry, ”Ox Lost, Snow Deep” was released in Fall 2024 from Anvil Press/a feed dog books.
”Deportment”, a book of selected poems from the early 1990s onward, was released by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in the autumn of 2018. Book of Short Sentences came out in the spring of 2016 from Mansfield Press following Holler, 2012, and Flutter,2008 (both Mansfield Press). Two collaborative poems have shown up in Our Days In Vaudeville by Stuart Ross and 29 Collaborators (Mansfield Press, Fall 2013). Her poems have appeared in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2005), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), and in Pissing Ice: An Anthology of ‘New’ Canadian Poets, (BookThug, 2004, as well as other anthologies. Her first perfect-bound book was Simple Master, published in 2002 by Pedlar Press.
Her essays have appeared in three recent anthologies: “Home” from MacIntyre Purcell, 2018, “Gush” from Frontenac House, 2018, and “Locations of Grief” from Wolsak & Wynn, 2020.
Her poem ”Terms and Conditions” was shortlisted for the first Lemon Hound Poetry Prize in 2014.
Read more about Alice Burdick in interviews conducted by Alex Porco on Open Book Toronto and on Lemon Hound and in gallery form here. You can watch and listen to Alice read some poems on a beach here.
