Overview

""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.

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9781566897051

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Reviews

"Praise for The Murmuring Grief of the Americas ""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 Past Praise: Praise for Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 Chicago Review of Books, ""Must-Read Books for March ""A panoramic and formally various investigation of the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. . . . Borzutzky's arresting writing sings and stuns as it addresses difficult, painful truths."" --Publishers Weekly, starred review ""Borzutzky handles history as liquid, the past a wave forever crashing into the present. . . . an urgently contemporary project, rejecting the pretense of retrospective distance in order to mourn from within chaos."" --Hannah Aizenman, The New Yorker Praise for Lake Michigan Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, 2019 ""A searing indictment and an immediate, dangerous, and urgent work."" --Booklist Praise for The Performance of Becoming Human Winner of the National Book Award, 2016 ""Like any good satirist, Borzutzky considers his subjectivity with the same lens he applies to the systems he critiques, and The Performance of Becoming Human is an apogee of that inquiry. Since The Book of Interfering Bodies, Daniel Borzutzky has been the fabulist we most need because he's unafraid to detail the truth of our oligarchy, without pedantry. In his figurative world our bodies are forced through privatized meat grinders, but funnily in the way that all dark horror stories trigger our gallows humor. I'm thrilled every time Borzutzky brings a book in the world, learn the most about reality from him."" ―Carmen Giménez Smith"

"Praise for The Murmuring Grief of the Americas Bookshop.org ""100 Most Anticipated Books of 2024"" ""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 ""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 Past Praise: Praise for Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 Chicago Review of Books, ""Must-Read Books for March ""A panoramic and formally various investigation of the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. . . . Borzutzky's arresting writing sings and stuns as it addresses difficult, painful truths."" --Publishers Weekly, starred review ""Borzutzky handles history as liquid, the past a wave forever crashing into the present. . . . an urgently contemporary project, rejecting the pretense of retrospective distance in order to mourn from within chaos."" --Hannah Aizenman, The New Yorker Praise for Lake Michigan Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, 2019 ""A searing indictment and an immediate, dangerous, and urgent work."" --Booklist Praise for The Performance of Becoming Human Winner of the National Book Award, 2016 ""Like any good satirist, Borzutzky considers his subjectivity with the same lens he applies to the systems he critiques, and The Performance of Becoming Human is an apogee of that inquiry. Since The Book of Interfering Bodies, Daniel Borzutzky has been the fabulist we most need because he's unafraid to detail the truth of our oligarchy, without pedantry. In his figurative world our bodies are forced through privatized meat grinders, but funnily in the way that all dark horror stories trigger our gallows humor. I'm thrilled every time Borzutzky brings a book in the world, learn the most about reality from him."" ―Carmen Giménez Smith"

Author Information

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.

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