Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018
Description
In Written after a Massacre, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unfair policing of certain kinds of bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy. He grieves for the children in cages and the martyrs of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburg. But pulsing amid Borzutzky's outrage over our era's tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice.Product Details
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About the Author
Reviews
"These poems apply a clarity of conscience and language to the surreal nightmare born of white supremacy and zero-sum-game capitalism. Borzutzky--like Reznikoff and Rukeyser, and Chilean poet Ra´ul Zurita, whom he has translated--reminds us that poetry is and has long been a tool of reckoning and refusal, a way of singing for what has been stolen, slaughtered, stifled. These are the songs we must learn to sing." --Tracy K. Smith
"Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 is a montage for the systemic torque of our bodies. With stunning alacrity, Daniel Borzutzky emboldens a list of images into reality, as a broken witness--phenomenology of the murmuring poet's 'guilt of this innocent lung.' Given rage to clean away the moral fiber of a culture led astray, we venture into the understructure of massacre with a book as a torch, providing humanity its navigation. Among these pages, emotional and spiritual selves gather to find cadence in perspective. 'We break we are broken we are, ' transformation meets self-creation, daring subject to engage and render. Fractures of society are given multiple angles, to form our own entry points--each perception its own formation of equanimity. Line by line, we repeat the prayers that might heal those we love, ourselves included. Borzutzky offers us a testament to the written breath--to hear poetry's fault line, running through each of us." --Edwin Torres, author of Xoeteox: the infinite word object
" I can't do anything but bow. This is lacerating work." --Achy Obejas
Praise for Daniel Borzutzky
"Borzutzky's intelligence and learning are formidable." --Los Angeles Times
"Violent, perverse, tender." --Eileen Myles, Poetry Foundation
"According to Borzutzky, we are all responsible for the current state of the union." --Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
"Through repetition and obsessive accumulation, every phrase leaps off the page, begging to be spoken aloud, or shouted. The work is as personally conflicted as Berryman's, as stealthy as Celan's, and as openly political as Ginsberg's." --National Book Award citation
"This is one of contemporary poetry's most cogent documents of humanity and suffering in the 21st century." --Publishers Weekly
