The hook to this book is full-flower in a quote from Marianne Boruch, describing her time in the cadaver lab: “The cadaver nevertheless pushed me aside to speak for herself, to give her take on dissection and her long life on the planet before she generously gave her body that those doctors-to-be might learn crucial secrets.”…and another quote: “Some books begin as a dare to the self.” Boruch is the most recent winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
A starred review in Library Journal says this about Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing: “Only a poet as accomplished as Boruch could make such beautiful verse while leading us through the everyday, of life’s subtle, steady shiftings (‘the bird’s hunger, seeking shape’). If the opening image of a pool filled with cruelly dredged up roses bespeaks quiet assent (‘I stood before them the way an animal/ accepts sun’), the next poem...
<P>In her wry and riveting new collection, Marianne Boruch discovers things often taken for granted and holds them up to deceptively casual light, questioning them both mercilessly and mercifully. Employing a masterly range of tone and form, Boruch makes a sometimes strange but always revealing investigation of world and self, history and memory, resistance and release. Here a woman levitates behind a door as her daughter badly bangs out Mozart. Here God is caught before the moment...
What to do with the everything crossing one’s path? Everything for and against, upside down and inside out, grief first then its dogged shadow life, which could be joy. In <i>The Anti-Grief</i>, Marianne Boruch challenges our conceptions of memory, age, and time, revealing the many layers of perception and awareness. A book of meditations, these poems venture out into the world, jump their synapse, tie and untie knots, and misbehave. From Emily Dickinson’s chamber pot to meat-eating...
writes a column in American Poetry Review according to Boruch, this was the strangest book she’s ever written, that it “came to me in a trance, almost perfectly formed, and I don’t remember writing it.” widely respected for weird intelligence mystical book about living and dying, with lots of air creatures and water creatures Boruch’s work appears with regularity in The New Yorker
