Bøger af Marianne Boruch

Meditations on life, literature, and curiosity amid the shadows

In this volume of meditations, Boruch's imagery blurs the line between natural and supernatural. And of course there is grief--working through grief, getting over grief, living with grief, and in these magnificent poems, anti-grief.rief.

Marianne Boruch's patience "allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw." --"Poetry"magazine

Is the world finite? Through place and time and the great expanse of Australia, Marianne Boruch ponders this, aided not just by wallabies and platypus, kangaroos and wombats, but by a cheeky Archangel who wanders in and out of her poems. The pertinent wisdom of an Indigenous Elder is here too, along with the continuing presence of Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and historian who in 77 CE posed the question Boruch considers. Written following Boruch's Fulbright in Australia, and on the heels of the devastating fires that began after her departure, Bestiary Darkis filled with strange and sweet details, beauty, and impending doom-the drought, fires, and floods that have grown unspeakable in scale. These poems face the ancient, unsettling relationship of humans and the natural world-the looming effect we've wrought on wildlife-and what solace and repair our learning even a little might mean.

The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic what-about and so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. The essays collected in The Little Death of Self are meditations toward poetry by a poet who finds this mysterious genre the weirdest, most compelling of all human ways to imagine - or fathom - the great world.

A stunning, poetic memoir ';that will transport readers to a time when a nation's youth searched for meaning against the backdrop of the Vietnam War' (Publishers Weekly). When she joins a pair of hitchhikers on a trip to California, a young Midwestern woman embarks on a journey of memory, beauty, and realization. This true story, set in 1971, recounts a fateful, nine-day trip into the American counterculture that begins on a whim and quickly becomes a mission to unravel a tragic mystery. The narrator's path leads her to Berkeley, San Francisco, Mill Valley, Big Sur, and finally to an abandoned resort motel that has become a down-on-its-luck commune in the desert of southern Colorado. The Glimpse Traveler describes with wry humor and deep feeling what it was like to witness a peculiar and impossibly rich time. ';A perceptive, engaging, intimate chronicle of the early 1970s, the road-weary hippie hitchhikers, the anti-war sentiment, the dope-induced haze. Boruch... captures this very specific, significant time and place with exquisite clarity and lyric detail and description.' Dinty Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

In these thoughtful, richly personal essays, Marianne Boruch takes a fresh view on old poets, considering such questions as how the atomic bomb changed William Carlos Williams's poetry and how Edison's listening, through his famous deafness, informs our sense of poetics. Other essays explore how the car's danger and solitude helps us understand American poetry, and how Dvorak and Whitman shared darker things than their curious love for trains. Boruch's personal memories and philosophical speculations create a distinct voice to match the collection's distinct opinions and ideas.