"While to Easterners the West has been seen as a land of hope and possibility, the darker view of a native Westerner is recorded here in Philip Burgess' compelling images of loss, defeat, cruelty, and endurance, lightened by radiant moments of grace and communion. The struggle to survive and to forgive one another in the harshly beautiful badlands of the West, and the bad land of experience, is rendered vividly. Burgess has painted an important piece of the canvas that is the West." ~Margaret Kingsland "In the far west of the great, rolling plains of North America is a sudden gash of dry, cavernous hills and an occasional coal seam that smolders with sulfur and smoke. The Badlands has been home to Philip Burgess and his ancestors since the end-time of the buffalo. In this shifting landscape of dry farms and ranges, whose settlements changes as their orientations to the river change, whose native peoples are intimate strangers to settler children who grow in silence, the only salvation is possession of a witching-wand spirit. The language of Philip Burgess' poems evokes a relentless land that demands unending physical exertion and ultimately the life of anyone who tries to love her. Between generations and siblings, love id deferred, yet inadvertently shared in gestures that loom large in memory. From this wide-open claustrophobic land, Philip Burgess goes to Vietnam, and, just as his ancestors, he is "...facing west with no real road in sight." After his return, he chooses to wander, to place his finely-tuned silence in the way of the worlds' tears, confusions of mind, and numbing sweat. After years in the great desert of self-exile, he returns to Montana to counsel war veterans, and to spend more than two decades writing poetry." ~Elizabeth Tomlinson, from the introduction to "Badlands Child."