Daniel Borzutzky

Powerfully, musically rich poems that explore hemispheric grief caused by mass capitalism, militarized policing, and nightmarish urban and immigration policies. “All I ever wanted is to keep the police away from the outside of my body and keep the police away from the inside of my body.” In The Murmuring Grief of the Americas , 2016 National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky holds to account the private interests driving Western humanitarian decisions, laying bare the immense toll of exploitative labor practices and the self-serving nature of authoritative bodies.

Winner of the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry. Daniel Borzutzky’s new collection of poetry, The Performance of Becoming Human, draws hemispheric connections between the US and Latin America, specifically touching upon issues relating to border and immigration policies, economic disparity, political violence, and the disturbing rhetoric of capitalism and bureaucracies. To become human is to navigate these borders, including those of institutions, the realities of over- and under-development, and the economies of privatization, in which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses. Borzutzky, whose writing Eileen Myles has described as “violent, perverse, and tender” in its portrayal of “American and global horror,” adds another chapter to a growing and important compilation 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.”