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.

The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic what-about and so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. Both the poem and the essay work beyond a human sense of time. Both welcome a deep mulling-over, endlessly mixing image and idea and running with scissors; certainly each distrusts the notion of premise or formulaic progression. The essays in The Little Death of Self emerged by way of an odd detail or bothersome question that would not quit- Why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows enormous, or as quiet as a half-second of genuine discovery? Why does closure in a poem so often mean keep going, so what if the world is ending! Must we stalk the poem or does the poem stalk us until the world clicks open? Boruch's intrepid curiosity led her to explore fields of expertise about which she knew little; then, perhaps through her reading, observation, and conversations with thoughtful people, she knew enough to be forgiven for delving into areas such as aviation, music, anatomy, history, medicine, photography, fiction, neuroscience, physics, anthropology, painting, and drawing. There's an addiction to metaphor here, an affection for image, sudden turns of thinking, and the great subjects of poetry: love, death, time, knowledge. There's amazement at the dumb luck of staying long enough in an inkling to make it a thought or a poem at all. Poets such as Keats, Stevens, Frost, Plath, Auden, and Bishop, along with painters, inventors, doctors, scientists, composers, musicians, neighbors, friends, and family-all traffic blatantly or under the surface-and one gets a glimpse of such fellow travelers now and then. The essays collected in The Little Death of Self are meditations toward poetry by a poet who finds this mysterious genre the weirdest, most compelling of all human ways to imagine-or fathom-the great world.

The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic what-about and so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. Both the poem and the essay work beyond a human sense of time. Both welcome a deep mulling-over, endlessly mixing image and idea and running with scissors; certainly each distrusts the notion of premise or formulaic progression. The essays in The Little Death of Self emerged by way of an odd detail or bothersome question that would not quit- Why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows enormous, or as quiet as a half-second of genuine discovery? Why does closure in a poem so often mean keep going, so what if the world is ending! Must we stalk the poem or does the poem stalk us until the world clicks open? Boruch's intrepid curiosity led her to explore fields of expertise about which she knew little; then, perhaps through her reading, observation, and conversations with thoughtful people, she knew enough to be forgiven for delving into areas such as aviation, music, anatomy, history, medicine, photography, fiction, neuroscience, physics, anthropology, painting, and drawing. There's an addiction to metaphor here, an affection for image, sudden turns of thinking, and the great subjects of poetry: love, death, time, knowledge. There's amazement at the dumb luck of staying long enough in an inkling to make it a thought or a poem at all. Poets such as Keats, Stevens, Frost, Plath, Auden, and Bishop, along with painters, inventors, doctors, scientists, composers, musicians, neighbors, friends, and family-all traffic blatantly or under the surface-and one gets a glimpse of such fellow travelers now and then. The essays collected in The Little Death of Self are meditations toward poetry by a poet who finds this mysterious genre the weirdest, most compelling of all human ways to imagine-or fathom-the great world.

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