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Summary
Summary
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. 2016 National Book Award Finalist. Following in the path of his acclaimed collections THE BOOK OF INTERFERING BODIES (Nightboat, 2011) and IN THE MURMURS OF THE ROTTEN CARCASS ECONOMY (Nightboat, 2015), Daniel Borzutzky returns to confront the various ways nation-states and their bureaucracies absorb and destroy communities and economies. In THE PERFORMANCE OF BECOMING HUMAN, the bay of Valparaiso merges into the western shore of Lake Michigan, where Borzutzky continues his poetic investigation into the political and economic violence shared by Chicago and Chile, two places integral to his personal formation. To become human is to navigate borders, including the fuzzy borders of institutions, the economies of privatization, overdevelopment, and underdevelopment, under which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses in cities, villages, deserts. Borzutzky, whose writing Eileen Myles has described as "violent, perverse, and tender" in its portrayal of a "kaleidoscopic journey of American horror and global horror," adds another chapter to a growing and important compendium of work that asks what it means to a be both a unitedstatesian and a globalized subject whose body is "shared between the earth, the state, and the bank."
"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 Gim#65533;nez Smith
"In this canticle for the age of listicles, Daniel Borzutzky performs a new political poetry in the crucible of 'overdevelopment,' when 'The city has disappeared into the privatized cellar of humanity.' Here, the socially engaged bro-poet is mercifully broken, relieved of his epic monumentality, and with it of a range of foundational fictions (nation/family/language/subject), leaving behind these gut-cantos (songs/fragments), detestimonios of a spectral self, at once buzz-fed and cankerously/cantankerously embodied. (You can't spell 'Neruda' without 'nerd' and Canto General never rocked 'The Gross and Borderless Body.') The ugly majesty of these prose blocks echoes the windswept expanses of neoliberal Chile and Chicago, their dead and their debt, their surrender and struggle. To read 'this book that is a country deposited not in your heart but in your mouth' is to confront becoming human as speech act, as language game, and to know the freedom and the terror of doing so. The painbeauty of Borzutzky's virtuoso, multi- register flow (abject punchlines included) is also a counter-flow to the death drive of capital, sentences for a radical sentience."--Urayo#65533;n Noel
Author Notes
Daniel Borzutzky is the author of a collection of fiction entitled Arbitrary Tales and a poetry chapbook entitled Failure in the Imagination. He also published full-length volumes of poetry including The Ecstasy of Capitulation, The Book of Interfering Bodies, and The Performance of Becoming Human, which won the National Book Award for poetry in 2016. He has translated a number of works by Chilean writers including the poet Jaime Luis Huenún and the author Juan Emas. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Koç University in Istanbul, and Wilbur Wright College of the City Colleges of Chicago.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Over the course of several volumes, Borzutzky (In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy) has been writing "a bedtime story for the end of the world." Simultaneously sparkling and abject, the apocalyptic tale does not reflect an imagined dystopia but very real crises of migration, state violence, and staggering inequity. This is one of contemporary poetry's most cogent documents of humanity and suffering in the 21st century, one born out of an impossible but necessary struggle to reconcile existence with destruction, excess with deprivation, and alienation with proximity. The borders Borzutzky describes and problematizes include "the invisible line between one civilization and another" as well as the liminal terrain between surreal nightmare and stark reality, which these poems inhabit. Borzutzky refuses the constructed innocence by which "my ignorance keeps me from being implicated in the system in which I am involucrated." And yet, "we do not understand why we are paid or beaten or loved" and "we do not understand our relationship one body to another." For Borzutzky, there is a choice: "Our silent faces stuck together// Or:// The broken testimony of the broken beat in the broken rhythm of the crumbling excesses of my broken face in the crumbling cadaver of this night." Borzutzky's work is a remarkable testament to the latter. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.