"These secret instructions, these rustic observations and tiny tales, are deceptively quiet. They steal in with a few cool words and then explode with creativity and light."
--Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation
"In this collection of concise, often surreal commands and narratives on how to cope with, and ultimately overcome, the loss of a lover, family member, and even yourself, Burch deftly blurs the line between the real and imagined, offering a lucid dream world where anything is possible and the bricks of the past act to strengthen the foundation of what’s to come."
--Mel Bosworth, Outsider Writers Collective
How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew
"...takes the tangible concrete instructions of folding paper, finding shapes in clouds, making connections with those around us, and turns them into weapons, uses them to impale us, makes a father a spearhead and launches it through our sternums. Burch is somehow lovingly violent with words."
--JA Tyler, The Chapbook Review
Aaron Burch has done it again. In his latest chapbook, released via PANK, he paints your imagination with images by developing words, phrases, and grammar exactly the way writers everywhere wish they could.
--Glen Binger, The Broadset Collective
"HOW TO TAKE YOURSELF APART, HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF ANEW reads like an instruction manual for the transformation from the dream of childhood to the reality of the adult world. It’s nostalgia combined with longing that grips its reader and guts him/her like the fish that begins this compelling narrative. Made of small parts, each its own story of breaking down and/or rebuilding, the book coheres in the way fragments of dreams arrange themselves in the waking hours to make the kind of sense that transcends the neat paraphrase of self-help and talk show vernacular. In other words, it does what literature should do: inform, entertain, unsettle.
--Christopher Kennedy
"How To Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew is a Bildungsroman of body scraps and mineral sediment, in prose that dares to reach toward rhyme."
--Lucy Corin
"I am not sure exactly what I just read, but I know I was transfixed by each and every word."
--Jason Behrends, What to Wear During an Orange Alert?
"Burch's prose, the contagion of his earnestness, so pure and guileless in its intent, hits with a quiet force. It's something to carry with you."
--Corey Beasley, Oh Young Lions