In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy

by Daniel Borzutzky

Overview

Daniel Borzutzky, whose work Eileen Myles calls “violent, perverse, tender,” offers a bracing new book that confronts violent action, from state sponsored torture and the bombing of civilians and other “non-essential personnel” to the collapse of the global economy, the barbarism of corporate greed, data fascism, and the deaths of immigrants attempting to cross borders. His book confronts the various horrors of our contemporary landscape through a poetry that literalizes violence, that seeks to find emotional connection and personal meaning in a world that is always exploding.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937658335
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	05/05/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

DANIEL BORZUTZKY’S previous books include The Book of Interfering Bodies and The Ecstasy of Capitulation. His poetry translations include Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks and Song for his Disappeared Love, and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl. His work has been recognized by grants from the PEN American Center and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Wright College of the City Colleges of Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

06/15/2015
Borzutzky (The Book of Interfering Bodies) turns an insomniac’s eye toward the forces and wastes of late capitalism, in a third collection that is corporeal, terrifying, discerning, and utterly—rapturously—insane. But unlike the familiar tropes of the sage fool or the tortured artist, the radical instability that charges Borzutzky’s poems is found in the maniacal outpouring of language sprung from a world of excess and decay. Pounding, rhythmic prose poems unleash images of violence, tenderness, migration, and mundanity in which everything leaks filth and data, bodies die and decompose, tongues are butchered and served, and attempts at sanitization fail. All of this is intimately and explicitly tied to the act of writing, as Borzutzky inverts Gertrude Stein’s essay “Composition as Explanation” to consider writing as entropy and rot: “This book owes its life to my mouth. Had it not been filled with mud, had the parasite not loved it, had the foam and the worms not caused my face to contort and my mouth to cave in, then I would not have had very much to say.” For all of its wild profusion, the book offers a carefully structured discourse. Borzutzky guides readers through a nightmarish terrain, one that offers a perspicacious and unsettling view of the current waking world. (June)

Publishers Weekly