Honored by "Library Journal" as an "Amazing Poetry Title"

"Extraordinary how in a single poem from 2013 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner Boruch slides 1800s London barber-surgeons and the dissection of murderers only (condemned to hell anyway) to the observation, 'Future or past, it's all we ever think about.' The first part of this sharp, surprising book captures our inescapable but slippery physicality in the world, the second the breakdown of the cadaver of a 99-year-old woman--told from her perspective, rather jauntily."--"Library Journal"

"Boruch displays a quietly gymnastic intellect in the examinations of art, the body, and the human condition."--"American Poets"

"Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: she sees and considers with intensity."--"The Washington Post"

"Some books begin as a dare to the self," notes poet Marianne Boruch. Inspired by life-study drawing classes and direct work in a cadaver lab, Boruch's latest book looks at what the body holds, and examines living through bodies deceased.

Marianne Boruch is the author of seven collections of poetry including "The Book of Hours" (Copper Canyon Press), two volumes of essays, and a memoir. In 2013 she won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.

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 expose 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."

Marianne Boruch, one of the most thoughtful and searching of contemporary poets, here draws from her four previous collections, two of which (Moss Burning and A Stick That Breaks and Breaks) were published by Oberlin College Press, and adds a group of twenty-five new poems to make a volume that is truly impressive in its range and authority. As Stephen Behrendt has put it: "Boruch's is a poetry about making visible what would else be invisible. It is about the risks--and the satisfactions--of confronting the many layers of anxiety and intensity that define modern existence."

Marianne Boruch, one of the most thoughtful and searching of contemporary poets, here draws from her four previous collections, two of which (Moss Burning and A Stick That Breaks and Breaks) were published by Oberlin College Press, and adds a group of twenty-five new poems to make a volume that is truly impressive in its range and authority. As Stephen Behrendt has put it: "Boruch's is a poetry about making visible what would else be invisible. It is about the risks--and the satisfactions--of confronting the many layers of anxiety and intensity that define modern existence."

In this remarkable book, her fourth collection of poems, Marianne Boruch continues to explore the world around her with curiosity, wry humor, searching skepticism, and thoughtful tenderness. Her poems range widely, letting themselves be triggered, often, by quite ordinary events and people, in order to launch themselves into unpredictable questions and considerations.