The Murmuring Grief of the Americas

“All I ever wanted is to keep the police away from the outside of my body and keep the police away from the inside of my body.”

In The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, 2016 National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky holds to account the private interests driving Western humanitarian decisions, laying bare the immense toll of exploitative labor practices and the self-serving nature of authoritative bodies. These powerful, musical poems explore our hemispheric grief under the yokes of labyrinthine immigration policies, militarized policing, and mass capitalism.

Publication date: August 6, 2024

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 120 Pages

ISBN: 9781566897051

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Winner of the 2024 Chicago Review of Books CHIRBy Award for Poetry

A Bookshop.org Most Anticipated Book of 2024

A Library Journal Book To Know in 2024

“Borzutzky continues his ongoing descent into global hell, which is capitalism, which is, in [his] rendering, turning us into robots that buy things, including lots and lots of guns. He's not wrong."

—Craig Morgan Teicher, The New York Times

“A poet of brilliance and bewilderment facing weaponized financial instruments, Borzutzky doesn't shy away from confronting the ugly, unsavory trenches of late capitalist life.”

—Booklist, starred review

“In his new collection, Borzutzky portrays a violently off-kilter world… resurgent fascist, apocalypse impending, as he ranges along the United States borders and across the Americas, whose “murmuring grief” arises from the unceded territories where we all sleep.”

—David Woo, Literary Hub

“Lyrical and bitingly elegiac, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas is unapologetically powerful in reclaiming individual and collective autonomy.”

—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

“Daniel Borzutzky is one of the most urgent, necessary, important, & truthful writers of this epoch.”

—Cait O’Kane, Tripwire

“In this compelling and riveting collection, Daniel Borzutzky exposes the harsh realities of current economic crises, social unrest, repressive immigration policies, and systematized bureaucracy, not just in the United States but throughout the Americas.”

—Leonora Simonovis, Poetry Foundation

“Borzutzky remains one of contemporary poetry’s most incisive surveyors of cultural and institutional rot."

—Library Journal

"In Borzutzky's hands, the modern cult of the individual is exposed as agent and puppet of the collective capitalist domination."

—Fady Joudah

"It is going to take a devastatingly long time for the world to fully reckon with the beats in the heavy drums that one hears when tuning in to the books of Daniel Borzutzky. It takes a caring, tender, loving–deeply loving–human to write a book this searing."

—Sawako Nakayasu

“With wholly unmistakable precision and unrelenting vision, Borzutzky reveals the utter darkness of it all (nation, money, property) and our imperative to make something new from it.”

—Susan Briante