Book description
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 of
creation, before knowledge, before "the invention/ of the question
too, the way all/ at heart are rhetorical, each leaf/ suddenly wedded to
its shade." It's here raucous boys on their bikes are told--through
telepathy--don't go to this war. Here, that a Dutch still life is
returned to the small chaos of its making. And Eve, in "stained
fascination," stares down the snake of the lost garden. The lyric
impulse in these deeply interior poems stops time, even as the world,
indifferent to its mystery, keeps happening.
Praise for Marianne Boruch:
"Her poems are complex rather than simple rooms ... they bring the
world's strangeness, and their own, home to whatever reader is open to
old mysteries, both in dreams and in the waking life they
illuminate."--Philip Booth, The Georgia Review
"Marianne Boruch's (work) has the wonderful, commanding power of
true attention: She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often
give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to
notice."--Robert Pinsky, Book World, The Washington Post
"Every detail of image and syntax shines with
multiplicity."--Donald Revell, The Ohio Review "There is no
living writer we need more these days than Marianne
Boruch."--Monica Berlin, Black Warrior Review MARIANNE BORUCH is
the author of five previous collections, including Descendant (1989) and
Poems: New and Selected (2004), and was a finalist for the Lenore
Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. For two decades, she
has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue and semi-regularly in the
non-residential program at Warren Wilson College.
