Dennis Nurkse

Dennis Nurkse (1949- ) is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently A COUNTRY OF  STRANGERS (a "new and selected"), He has won many awards and served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001.

Nurkse has taught poetry at Rikers Island Correctional Facility and in inner-city literacy programs, as well as at MFA programs at Rutgers, Brooklyn College, and Stonecoast. For the Brooklyn Public Library, he edited THIS BEAUTIFUL NAME IS MINE, poems by inner-city children. 

First Grade Homework

The child’s assignment:

“What is a city?”

All dusk she sucks her pencil

while cars swish by

like ghosts, neighbors’ radios

forecast rain, high clouds,

diminishing winds: at last

she writes: “The city is everyone.”

Now it’s time

for math, borrowing and exchanging,

the long discipleship

to zero, the stranger,

the force that makes us

what we study: father and child,

writing in separate books,

infinite and alone.

— D. Nurkse