In mid-June I received the heartbreaking news that poet and longtime Sun contributor Chris Bursk had been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. On June 21 Chris died in his home, surrounded by his family. He was seventy-eight years old. When I learned of his death, I reread the poems he’d sent us over the last four decades, and I felt the loss of the writer and man who was as sincere and compassionate as he was disarming and irreverent.
Chris and I first crossed paths in the 1970s. Living in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, he’d been having a hard time with his writing, depressed that his poems were getting nothing but rejections. Meanwhile, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I was trying to keep The Sun alive in a dilapidated house with a printing press that kept breaking down and a circulation of five hundred readers.
