Marianne Boruch – författare

When she joins a pair of hitchhikers on a trip to California, a young Midwestern woman embarks on a journey about memory and knowledge, beauty and realization. This true story, set in 1971, recounts a fateful, nine-day trip into the American counterculture that begins on a whim and quickly becomes a mission to unravel a tragic mystery. The narrator's path leads her to Berkeley, San Francisco, Mill Valley, Big Sur, and finally to an abandoned resort motel, now become a down-on-its-luck commune in the desert of southern Colorado. Neither a memoir about private misery, nor a shocking exposé of life in a turbulent era, The Glimpse Traveler describes with wry humor and deep feeling what it was like to witness a peculiar and impossibly rich time.

Meditations on life, literature, and curiosity amid the shadowsIn her fourth essay collection, award-winning author Marianne Boruch explores the possibilities of hope even in darkness. Through poetry, the silence of Trappist monks, the pandemic moment, the Wright brothers’ quirky stab at flight, treasured knickknacks, and more, this book celebrates the weird, the mundane, the overlooked, and the promise of a future. Though each essay is distinct, foraging fresh ways into Louise GlÜck, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Langston Hughes, and more, they are all connected through the thread of Emily Dickinson’s comment that her fate was to “sing, as a Boy does by the Burying Ground . . .” Even in times filled with horror, we find beauty. Maybe we can sing in the blackest of nights.Thoughtful and expressive, this collection provides solace and humor for readers in a world where both are often in short supply.

In her wry and riveting new collection, Marianne Boruch discovers things often taken for granted and holds them up to deceptively casual light, questioning them both mercilessly and mercifully. Employing a masterly range of tone and form, Boruch makes a sometimes strange but always revealing investigation of world and self, history and memory, resistance and release. Here a woman levitates behind a door as her daughter badly bangs out Mozart. Here God is caught before the moment of creation, before knowledge, before "the invention/ of the question too, the way all/ at heart are rhetorical, each leaf/ suddenly wedded to its shade." It's here raucous boys on their bikes are told-through telepathy-don't go to this war. Here, that a Dutch still life is returned to the small chaos of its making. And Eve, in "stained fascination," stares down the snake of the lost garden. The lyric impulse in these deeply interior poems stops time, even as the world, indifferent to its mystery, keeps happening.Praise for Marianne Boruch:"Her poems are complex rather than simple rooms ... they bring the world's strangeness, and their own, home to whatever reader is open to old mysteries, both in dreams and in the waking life they illuminate."-Philip Booth, The Georgia Review"Marianne Boruch's (work) has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice."-Robert Pinsky, Book World, The Washington Post"Every detail of image and syntax shines with multiplicity."-Donald Revell, The Ohio Review

This new collection features twenty-five new poems and a generous selection by the author from each of her four previous volumes - View from the Gazebo, Descendant. Moss Burning, and A Stick that Breaks and Breaks.

This new collection features twenty-five new poems and a generous selection by the author from each of her four previous volumes - View from the Gazebo, Descendant. Moss Burning, and A Stick that Breaks and Breaks.

Collected here are sixteen essays on poets and poetry, the writing life, and a host of fascinating topics that come into the wide range of Marianne Boruch's attention. She examines how the imagination works with mystery and surprise in a variety of poets from Elizabeth Bishop to Theodore Roethke, from Russell Edson to Larry Levis, from Walt Whitman to Eavan Boland. Combining a richly associative personal style with original insights on poetic texts and historical and cultural musing, Boruch considers how the atomic bomb changed William Carlos Williams's deepest ambition for poetry, and how Edison's listening, through his famous deafness, informs our sense of the poetic line. Other essays explore how the car--its danger and solitude--helps us understand American poetry or how Dvorak and Whitman shared darker things than their curious love for trains. Poetry transforms, changing over time in the work of individual poets as well as changing us as we read it or write it. Boruch's writing has a musical, incantatory style, creating a mood in which many of her subjects are immersed.Her approach isn't meant to fix or crystallize her ideas in any hard and fast light, but rather to present the music of her thinking.