Overview

Meditations on life, literature, and curiosity amid the shadows In her fourth essay collection, award-winning author Marianne Boruch explores the possibilities of hope even in darkness. Through poetry, the silence of Trappist monks, the pandemic moment, the Wright brothers’ quirky stab at flight, treasured knickknacks, and more, this book celebrates the weird, the mundane, the overlooked, and the promise of a future. Though each essay is distinct, foraging fresh ways into Louise GlÜck, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Langston Hughes, and more, they are all connected through the thread of Emily Dickinson’s comment that her fate was to “sing, as a Boy does by the Burying Ground . . .” Even in times filled with horror, we find beauty. Maybe we can sing in the blackest of nights. Thoughtful and expressive, this collection provides solace and humor for readers in a world where both are often in short supply.

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9780810146921

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Reviews

""Ruminating about the pandemic, [Boruch] asks, ""Is there a case to be made for poetry in this plague year?"" According to these elegant essays, the answer is yes. An insightful collection of tight essays."" --Kirkus ""[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."" --The Washington Post on Poems: New and Selected ""Boruch displays a quietly gymnastic intellect in the examinations of art, the body, and the human condition."" --American Poets Magazine on Cadaver, Speak ""Like Elizabeth Bishop, Boruch refuses to see more than there is in things -- but her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw.""--Poetry Magazine on Grace, Fallen From

Author Information

Marianne Boruch is the award-winning author of numerous poetry and essay collections, including Bestiary Dark, The Anti-Grief, The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays toward Poetry, and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler. Among her honors are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim and two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency, a Fulbright Senior Scholar appointment, and a Fulbright Visiting Professorship.

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