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
Winner of the 2024 Chicago Review of Books CHIRBy Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book 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...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
"Art is always consumed with distinctions between the interior and the exterior of the self. Daniel Borzutzky belongs to the lineage of poets who refuse this demarcation. His poetry of anti-capital humanism converses with Canetti's Crowds and Power. In Borzutzky's hands, the modern cult of the individual is exposed as agent and puppet of the collective capitalist domination. But The Murmuring Grief of the Americas is also an aesthetic elation that quotes itself because it echoes so many others. It mixes the waters of the reverent with the irreverent." —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. We're fools, we're complicit, we suffer. Skin and bones ache while reading. The heart riles up." —Sawako Nakayasu
“In
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, Daniel Borzutzky maps massacres and environmental disasters, recording corpses that accumulate like caches of personal data. We are nothing, he reminds us, to our nations, our corporations, and the earth that we desecrate. 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
Praise for Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018
