The Anti-Grief
What to do with the everything crossing one’s path? Everything for and against, upside down and inside out, grief first then its dogged shadow life, which could be joy. In The Anti-Grief, Marianne Boruch challenges our conceptions of memory, age, and time, revealing the many layers of perception and awareness. A book of meditations, these poems venture out into the world, jump their synapse, tie and untie knots, and misbehave. From Emily Dickinson’s chamber pot to meat-eating plants, from an angry octopus to crowds of salmon swimming upstream, Boruch’s imagery blurs the line between natural and supernatural. And of course there is grief—working through grief, getting over grief, living with grief, and in these magnificent poems, anti-grief.
Marianne Boruch’s nine books of poetry include Eventually One Dreams the Real Thingand Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon, 2016 and 2012), three essay collections, and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler, about hitchhiking in the US in 1971(Indiana, 2011). Among her honors are the Kingsley-Tufts Award for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon, 2011), four Pushcart Prizes, plus fellowships and/or residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and two Fulbright Professorships, the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and the University of Canberra, in Australia. She’s been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and at two national parks, Denali and Isle Royale. Boruch taught at Purdue University for thirty-one years, was the founder of the MFA program there, becoming a Professor Emeritus in May, 2018. She continues to teach in the low-residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College where she has been on faculty since 1988.
More books by author
