Overview

Every Wrong Direction recreates and dissects the bitter education of Dan Burt, an American emigré who never found a home in America. It begins in the row homes of Jewish immigrants and working-class Italians on the mean streets of 1950s South Philadelphia. Every Wrong Direction follows the author from the rough, working-class childhood that groomed him to be a butcher or charter boat captain, through America, Britain, and Saudi Arabia as student, lawyer, spy, culture warrior, and expatriate, ending with a photo of his college rooms at St John's College, Cambridge. Between this beginning and end, through a Philadelphia commuter college, to Cambridge, then Yale Law School, across the working to upper classes, three countries, and seven cities over forty three years, it maps his pursuit of, realisation, disillusionment with, and abandonment of America and the American Dream.

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9781800171909

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Reviews

'Dan Burt is a fine poet, and this memoir has all the sensitivity and vigilance you might expect from a writer with such a background. But his prose also has a robustness and documentary power that continually startles and engages.' - Sir Andrew Motion

'He is a writer of intensity and passion' - John Kinsella

Author Information

Dan Burt was born in 1942 in South Philadelphia, read English at St. John's College, Cambridge, and in 1969, graduated from Yale Law School. He has practiced commercial, government, and public-interest law in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia; has been a businessman; and, since 2001, is an Honorary Fellow of St. John's. Carcanet Press published his first poetry collection in 2008 and his fourth in 2019. Marlborough Graphics / Lintott Press brought out a poetry and photography collaboration with Paul Hodgson (2010), and You Think It Strange, his brief childhood memoir, appeared in the United Kingdom and the United States (2014, 2015). U.K. and U.S. newspapers, periodicals, and anthologies have featured his poetry and prose—The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman, Commonweal, TLS, Granta, PN Review, and Clutag Press, among others—as has the BBC and Poetry Archive. He lives and writes in London, Cambridge, and Schooner Head, Maine.

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