THE MURMURING GRIEF OF THE AMERICAS
2016 National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky presents six poems
E. McKnight Kauffer, Three Tulips, (1943) brush and gouache, 45 × 33.6 cm (17 11/16 × 13 1/4 in.), Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 1997-134-14.
STATEMENT OF POETIC BELIEF
Poetry and the composition of decomposition by way of introduction to the idea that
decomposition chooses its composition but since we are never composed we are always
decomposing our compositions in the worlds we imagine and the worlds we occupy and
the worlds we imagine and the worlds we occupy join in the writing and so we write
because we don’t know how to understand the screams and horrors we write because we
barely know how to survive we write because of the potential languages within the
languages we speak we write because of the worlds and sounds we have not yet found
we write because of the howls and shrieks and the falling and the falling and the
barracks and the holes in the floor and the ways in which time and death come together
to create timedeath how grief and shame come together to create griefshame and there
are blanknesses so many blanknesses and the bodies that survive them and there are
words and sometimes the words are so much that they make us want to continue to not
be absent or to be herethere in the absentpresent to find more words to find more light
to breathe as if our life depends on it.
—Daniel Borzutzky, Chicago, 2024
2022 Pen Award for Poetry in Translation winner
2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize finalist
2017 American Literary Translation Association’s National Translation Award
2016 National Book Award for Poetry winner
EDITORIAL NOTE
The following poems are from THE MURMURING GRIEF OF THE AMERICAS (Coffee House Press, 2024) by Daniel Borzutzky. Reprinted with permission of Coffee House Press. All images are curated by HTI Open Plaza.
The poems are accompanied by audio recordings read by the poet.
C. Armstrong, Collector, Cysticercus Tenuicollis Rudolphi, 1810, Invertebrate Zoology, Platyhelminthes, National Museum of Natural History, US National Parasite Collection Date: June 1934, 1340302.
Gastón Orellana, Untitled, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,1981, opaque paint and colored pencil on paper 19 13/16 x 27 1/2 in. (50.4 x 69.9 cm), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 86.3504.
Gastón Orellana, Radar Station,1981, oil and ink on canvas 17 5/8 X 23 3/8 in. (44.8 X 59.4 cm), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 86.3500.
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Mobile, Alabama, (May 6, 2010), Aerial images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill taken from a US Coast Guard HC-144 aircraft. The flight was conducted primarily for media support and to plot the locations of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, US Navy. Photo by Michael B. Watkins, Mass Communication Specialist First Class.
United States-Mexico Border Fence, fence, barbed wire, metal (overall material), National Museum of American History, 2009.0242.28
"It is going to take a devastatingly long time for the world to fully reckon with the beats in the heavy drums that one hears when tuning in to the books of Daniel Borzutzky. It takes a caring, tender, loving–deeply loving–human to write a book this searing. We're fools, we're complicit, we suffer. Skin and bones ache while reading. The heart riles up."
Sawako Nakayasu,
Poet
