Poems by Daniel Borzutzky
August 6, 2024 • 6 x 9 • 120 Pages • 9781566897051
“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.
About the Author
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.
Praise for The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
“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...Borzutzky portrays a consciousness totally infected by the technological, political and economic developments that have led to a world where...we each spend hours every day entering our personal information into Meta’s database so they can sell it." —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
Praise for Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018
Chicago Review of Books, “Must-Read Books for March”
“A panoramic and formally various investigation of the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. . . . Borzutzky’s arresting writing sings and stuns as it addresses difficult, painful truths.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Borzutzky handles history as liquid, the past a wave forever crashing into the present. . . . an urgently contemporary project, rejecting the pretense of retrospective distance in order to mourn from within chaos.” —Hannah Aizenman, The New Yorker
Praise for Lake Michigan
Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, 2019
“A searing indictment and an immediate, dangerous, and urgent work.” —Booklist
Praise for The Performance of Becoming Humana
Winner of the National Book Award, 2016
“Like any good satirist, Borzutzky considers his subjectivity with the same lens he applies to the systems he critiques, and The Performance of Becoming Human is an apogee of that inquiry. Since The Book of Interfering Bodies, Daniel Borzutzky has been the fabulist we most need because he's unafraid to detail the truth of our oligarchy, without pedantry. In his figurative world our bodies are forced through privatized meat grinders, but funnily in the way that all dark horror stories trigger our gallows humor. I'm thrilled every time Borzutzky brings a book in the world, learn the most about reality from him.” —Carmen Giménez Smith