The Murmuring Grief of the Americas

Borzutzky’s recent poetry collections Lake Michigan and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 were more hyper-focused than his earlier work, treading similar discursive territory but more conceptual in nature, attuned to the specifics of geography and particular circumstance. In his latest, Borzutzky moves back toward the territory of broader survey and the aesthetic style of un-poetry that he has sometimes been charged with. His writing is preoccupied with topics that will be familiar to returning readers: the violence inherent to both state and capital, the power of the individual’s voice within oppressive systems, and fundamental conceptions of poetry. Borzutzky’s approach, as per usual, results in any number of lines that could reasonably function as the thesis of his overall project, lines that fold satire and systemic critique into an indistinguishable whole. But there’s also a slight unwieldiness to this work: his skewering can feel more uncomfortably sneering than incisive at times, which results in a bit of whiplash in the collection’s sequencing. The collective impact is still pummeling, but not everything lands.