In Black Dog Day, Brian Burt’s precisely crafted and plainspoken poems trace a journey along the trellis of connection in search of the pure present tense offered by the daily example of the poet’s black dog. A rejoinder to a world in which social media snark and a never-ending 24-hour news cycle are incessantly clamoring to narrow our world while purporting to widen it, Burt’s poems invite us to turn our attention elsewhere - to a local world in which the most important current events take place in the arc of the seasons, the rhythms of our gardens and forests, and among those we love. Sometimes surprising, sometimes intimate, and always thoughtful, each quietly graceful poem shows us ways to find our place in the world immediately around us.