What do you think?
Rate this book
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
“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. These powerful, musical poems explore our hemispheric grief under the yokes of labyrinthine immigration policies, militarized policing, and mass capitalism.
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. These powerful, musical poems explore our hemispheric grief under the yokes of labyrinthine immigration policies, militarized policing, and mass capitalism.
- GenresPoetryAmerican History
119 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 6, 2024
About the author
Daniel Borzutzky
30 books39 followersDaniel Borzutzky is a Chicago-based poet and translator. His collection The Performance of Becoming Human won the 2016 National Book Award.
The son of Chilean immigrants, Borzutzky's work often addresses immigration, worker exploitation, political corruption, and economic disparity. He teaches at Wright College.
The son of Chilean immigrants, Borzutzky's work often addresses immigration, worker exploitation, political corruption, and economic disparity. He teaches at Wright College.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
December 31, 2024
A startingly prescient collection that plays with form and tone throughout. I truly loved the unapologetic nature of this and Borzutzky's repetition hammers in the stark realities he captures in the poetics of this important work.
April 30, 2026
from Poem Written under a Pseudonym
You think your poems don't matter at all and that no one reads them or cares about them then one day you get an email from a woman you've never met before telling you that her husband read your last book then killed himself and in the suicide note he keeps quoting lines from your poems and she thinks you should know this because you might want to take the book out of circulation to prevent others from having to bury the people in their lives they love most (15)
Writing #1209 {In the Penal Colony}
The writing is the knot that binds the gag
The writing is the bandage on the bleeding nose
The writing is the mouth that refuses to scream
The suppressed cough the scarred lip the shirt onto which the dribble is dripped
The air between observer and observed between appraiser and appraised
This is the writing
The tongue that touches rope
Yarns strands fibers
The jaw that cracks backward
The finger that dies forward
The unfinished burn of the knuckle
The heavy creak of the floor
The red tint of the light bulb
The shifting of the shadow
The inverted mouth
The seconds cleaved into the eyes
The rancid milk at the bottom of the cup
The nail in the door and the shattered belt loop
The moment the appraiser looks away from the authentic body
The hybrid gland the infected toenail
The excavation of the mouth
The discipline the identification the disappearance of molecular reality
If we can't write this then we can't write anything he wants to say
But they need a report an objective summation
They need to know how long it takes for the machine to inscribe its justice
They need to measure its power its accuracy its efficiency
Minutes hours volts watts gigabytes
The gentle hum of the authoritative machine
The impossibility of not looking at the digital display
Of not counting the seconds
Of not seeing the minutes
The screams that are screamed in the silence that can only be accessed when it is understood that what must be documented what must be narrated what must be evaluated what must be written is what can never be documented narrated evaluated or written
What must be communicated is the indecipherability
Of a body that smiles when it is forced to smile
The curling of the lips is the writing
The wheezing of the lungs is the writing
The sweat the mucus the ripped sock on the sweaty foot
The microscopic beings in the skin
The tiny hairs
The dead cells
The prose of the swollen jawbone
The moaning mouth is the writing
The writing is the breathscribble
The tonguescribble
The writing is
The word that will never arrive (25-6)
from Lake Michigan, Scene #525
How much consciousness will grow in the dead tree (45)
from Secret Code #306
You can begin a sentence in the middle of another sentence in order to make a new sentence (67)
from FOMO
Whose woods these are I think I know (80)
How I Wrote Certain of My Books
I met the poet before he disappeared
The timeline of events doesn’t make sense
I don’t think you are lying but I suspect there are gaps elisions important details you are not disclosing
You have a way of speaking that doesn’t allow me to ask questions
Are you like this with everyone?
You keep the people who love you most at a distance drawing them in when they talk about themselves yet holding back when they want to know more about you
I met the poet in a writing workshop he offered out of his home
I was one of four students in the class
There was one student who never spoke and never turned in any writing and the poet loved her because the silent student understood that the ultimate form of poetry was silence and we all saw something sublime in her refusal to acknowledge even the most basic forms of communal norms and discourse
Another student was a father of three kids
He owned a small business and was “doing something for himself for a change”
Austerity measures have forced me to abandon aesthetic or narrative unity
I work too much and I don’t have time to write anymore and it limits my creativity and coherence
I cut my budg by twenty-five perc and now I can’t eve finis a
The poet’s preferred way of signing books was Greetings from the land of anti-value
Like all good poets the poet hated his own poetry
I loved his first book but he thought all the poems were cheap imitations of René Char and Gertrude Stein
All poets should hate their own poetry said the poet
You should never be able to look at your own poetry without feeling utterly repulsed
If you are proud of your own poetry or enjoy reading your own poetry then you need to figure out how to write poems that will offend yourself just a little bit more “robustly”
The father of three who was doing something for himself for a change wrote epic poems about his childhood
The poet referred to the father of three’s poems as sociopathic imitations of Frank O’Hara only more interesting
They were horror stories frankly and none of us knew how to respond to them
The poet loved that we didn’t know how to respond to the father of three’s poems
He thought the best response to a poem was to feel like what the fuck did I just read I don’t have a fucking idea what I just read what did I just read do you understand remotely what I just read what the fuck am I reading
And it appeared that the father of three met this standard of what-the-fuckery in his epic poem about a man (now a poet of course) who watched his mother kill his father when he was a child
Did the father of three’s mother actually kill his father?
(Fuck you said the father of three I’m not telling)
Probably not but every once in a while his poems would contain the kind of detail a line from a coroner’s report or a snippet from a newspaper article that led us to think that something along those lines must have happened to him
The father of three was kind and cheerful and always showed up to the workshop with wine or cookies or cake
The poet would give advice like fuck doing new things you’re a writer not an iPhone
You don’t need a constant update
You don’t need to keep changing your algorithm
The other student in the workshop was an attorney and she was about to retire
Her favorite poets were H.D. and Sylvia Plath and she knew almost every detail of Greek mythology, which often served as tropes in her poems
She wrote poems that possessed what the poet once called “a subtle hint of bureaucratic eroticism”
She was terrified of retiring and was “pursuing” poetry because she wanted to make sure she had plenty of activities to keep her mind from atrophying in her retirement and so she designed complex mazes of poems that were impossible to work their way out of and the poet would ask her questions like
What does this poem hate? What does this poem love? How can you make this poem hate more lovingly and love more hatefully?
I was the other student in the workshop and I hated writing poems that looked like poems so the poet thought I had the right attitude about poetry even if my poems were didactic or bland or facile
It’s not that I’m a bad writer the critic wrote about my last book rather I appear to be writing as a “bad” writer on purpose
I never thought of myself as being a bad writer on purpose but as soon as the critic said this a light bulb went off I must think of myself as being a bad writer on purpose and then everything changed I wrote a bad book on purpose and it was the best book I ever wrote and I won a big prize and I was invited to give a reading at Harvard
I am flexible and I mold my so-called aesthetic choices to satisfy the criteria of the basest members of my audience
The poet didn’t know if being a poet meant being the best/worst version of himself or the best/worst version of someone else
The object of a poem he used to say is to try to put every possible thing into the poem so that the poem is not so much a poem but a container for the entire world and in this way there might eventually be no distinction between living and writing and art and life and art and death and the world as we know it and the world we desire and the world we despise
Unitedstatesians are obsessed with privacy Is that your chocolate in my peanut butter?
Every line I’ve ever written is a version of another line I’ve ever written and sometimes I write the same lines over and over again to see if they sound different in a different context
As a child I spent fourteen hours a day watching television
Is that your chocolate in my peanut butter?
They say the poet went crazy but it was just back spasms that triggered a series of medications and hallucinations which led to him being admitted into a psychiatric hospital named after a nineteenth-century war criminal
Is a bear Catholic?
Does the pope shit in the woods?
He classified my poem as a bad imitation of Vicente Huidobro's "Monumento al Mar" but in reality it was nothing like Huidobro or perhaps it was a bit like Huidobro if Huidobro wrote about psychoanalysis death metal the television show Twin Peaks a device to detect drugs hidden in the gastrointestinal tracts of border crossers the unpsoken relationship between Moses and his more talkative brother Aaron Kafka's short story "A Report to an Academy" and getting your cell phone stolen while stepping out of the metro in downtown Santiago on your way to lunch at a restaurant that used to be in the house where Vicente Huidobro lived as a child
I recognize that some readers will feel alienated by a reference to a poem they haven't read by a writer they haven't read but I'm not choosy or pretentious and mostly I believe that words and names are interchangeable
I like the flow of your poem but I have no idea what any of it actually means
He classified my poem as a bad of imitation of Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the thing with feathers yet he told me I did such a good job of writing a bad imitation that he could not forego giving me the highest possible marks on the assignment
A phrase as simple as “I hate your fucking guts” can mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people
It was the end of a long evening and the poet was feeling generous so he gave me a thumb drive with decades' worth of unpublished writing a memoir a novel three or four collections of poems and told me to do whatever I want with them
I’m dying frankly and I think it would be great for your career if you put your name on some of the better poems and send them out for publication
According to brittanica.com there is a form of torture called “Crushed by Elephant” which is when a prisoner is placed on the ground in front of an elephant and crushed by it
But I’m warning you if you google “Crushed by Elephant” you will feel as if the entire internet already knows that people have been crushed by elephants for centuries and it might be more beneficial to search for scaphism the ancient practice of a sealing a victim between two boats feeding him milk and honey covering his face with milk and honey so that flies swarm around his face and then as the victim defecates inside the boat flies and maggots “grow up inside” and slowly begin to devour his flesh
Now that the country is “teetering on dictatorship” the poets have come to believe that the subjectivity of subjective experience has a responsibility to be as ugly as the objectivity of objective experience
Awkward sentence bro
Time for another revision (82-7)
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
They take the children underground. They tie their hands behind their backs. They put the children in a cage. They tell the children: we have a vision for the future. We will blow up the river. You will blow up the river. Because it's too expensive to maintain it. Together we will blow up the river and we will fill it with pharmaceuticals. There are mufflers and tires floating in the river. There are plastic toys from Asia in the river. There are cell phones in the river. SIM cards and lithium batteries in the river. Cadmium in the river. Cobalt oxide and carbon graphite in the river. There are desperate laborers trying to cross the river. How much should we pay them? asks the authoritative bodies. Market rate? They will love us like we are their parents, say the authoritative bodies. They will protect the pharmaceuticals. They will protect the lithium. They will protect the cobalt. They will protect the carbon and the graphite. They will love the metals and minerals, the enzymes and acids, as if they were their most cherished friends and family. (113)
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
The hole they dig in the street is deep enough to fill with the bodies the police murder. They do not need to cram the bodies into the hole. The bodies fit comfortably into the earth. They do not need to squeeze the bodies into the hole. They do not need to burn the bodies. They treat the bodies better in death than they do in life. There is no decomposition. There is only composition. The dead bodies accumulate as if they are the currency that has long been promised by the agents of power and money. (116)
You think your poems don't matter at all and that no one reads them or cares about them then one day you get an email from a woman you've never met before telling you that her husband read your last book then killed himself and in the suicide note he keeps quoting lines from your poems and she thinks you should know this because you might want to take the book out of circulation to prevent others from having to bury the people in their lives they love most (15)
Writing #1209 {In the Penal Colony}
The writing is the knot that binds the gag
The writing is the bandage on the bleeding nose
The writing is the mouth that refuses to scream
The suppressed cough the scarred lip the shirt onto which the dribble is dripped
The air between observer and observed between appraiser and appraised
This is the writing
The tongue that touches rope
Yarns strands fibers
The jaw that cracks backward
The finger that dies forward
The unfinished burn of the knuckle
The heavy creak of the floor
The red tint of the light bulb
The shifting of the shadow
The inverted mouth
The seconds cleaved into the eyes
The rancid milk at the bottom of the cup
The nail in the door and the shattered belt loop
The moment the appraiser looks away from the authentic body
The hybrid gland the infected toenail
The excavation of the mouth
The discipline the identification the disappearance of molecular reality
If we can't write this then we can't write anything he wants to say
But they need a report an objective summation
They need to know how long it takes for the machine to inscribe its justice
They need to measure its power its accuracy its efficiency
Minutes hours volts watts gigabytes
The gentle hum of the authoritative machine
The impossibility of not looking at the digital display
Of not counting the seconds
Of not seeing the minutes
The screams that are screamed in the silence that can only be accessed when it is understood that what must be documented what must be narrated what must be evaluated what must be written is what can never be documented narrated evaluated or written
What must be communicated is the indecipherability
Of a body that smiles when it is forced to smile
The curling of the lips is the writing
The wheezing of the lungs is the writing
The sweat the mucus the ripped sock on the sweaty foot
The microscopic beings in the skin
The tiny hairs
The dead cells
The prose of the swollen jawbone
The moaning mouth is the writing
The writing is the breathscribble
The tonguescribble
The writing is
The word that will never arrive (25-6)
from Lake Michigan, Scene #525
How much consciousness will grow in the dead tree (45)
from Secret Code #306
You can begin a sentence in the middle of another sentence in order to make a new sentence (67)
from FOMO
Whose woods these are I think I know (80)
How I Wrote Certain of My Books
I met the poet before he disappeared
The timeline of events doesn’t make sense
I don’t think you are lying but I suspect there are gaps elisions important details you are not disclosing
You have a way of speaking that doesn’t allow me to ask questions
Are you like this with everyone?
You keep the people who love you most at a distance drawing them in when they talk about themselves yet holding back when they want to know more about you
I met the poet in a writing workshop he offered out of his home
I was one of four students in the class
There was one student who never spoke and never turned in any writing and the poet loved her because the silent student understood that the ultimate form of poetry was silence and we all saw something sublime in her refusal to acknowledge even the most basic forms of communal norms and discourse
Another student was a father of three kids
He owned a small business and was “doing something for himself for a change”
Austerity measures have forced me to abandon aesthetic or narrative unity
I work too much and I don’t have time to write anymore and it limits my creativity and coherence
I cut my budg by twenty-five perc and now I can’t eve finis a
The poet’s preferred way of signing books was Greetings from the land of anti-value
Like all good poets the poet hated his own poetry
I loved his first book but he thought all the poems were cheap imitations of René Char and Gertrude Stein
All poets should hate their own poetry said the poet
You should never be able to look at your own poetry without feeling utterly repulsed
If you are proud of your own poetry or enjoy reading your own poetry then you need to figure out how to write poems that will offend yourself just a little bit more “robustly”
The father of three who was doing something for himself for a change wrote epic poems about his childhood
The poet referred to the father of three’s poems as sociopathic imitations of Frank O’Hara only more interesting
They were horror stories frankly and none of us knew how to respond to them
The poet loved that we didn’t know how to respond to the father of three’s poems
He thought the best response to a poem was to feel like what the fuck did I just read I don’t have a fucking idea what I just read what did I just read do you understand remotely what I just read what the fuck am I reading
And it appeared that the father of three met this standard of what-the-fuckery in his epic poem about a man (now a poet of course) who watched his mother kill his father when he was a child
Did the father of three’s mother actually kill his father?
(Fuck you said the father of three I’m not telling)
Probably not but every once in a while his poems would contain the kind of detail a line from a coroner’s report or a snippet from a newspaper article that led us to think that something along those lines must have happened to him
The father of three was kind and cheerful and always showed up to the workshop with wine or cookies or cake
The poet would give advice like fuck doing new things you’re a writer not an iPhone
You don’t need a constant update
You don’t need to keep changing your algorithm
The other student in the workshop was an attorney and she was about to retire
Her favorite poets were H.D. and Sylvia Plath and she knew almost every detail of Greek mythology, which often served as tropes in her poems
She wrote poems that possessed what the poet once called “a subtle hint of bureaucratic eroticism”
She was terrified of retiring and was “pursuing” poetry because she wanted to make sure she had plenty of activities to keep her mind from atrophying in her retirement and so she designed complex mazes of poems that were impossible to work their way out of and the poet would ask her questions like
What does this poem hate? What does this poem love? How can you make this poem hate more lovingly and love more hatefully?
I was the other student in the workshop and I hated writing poems that looked like poems so the poet thought I had the right attitude about poetry even if my poems were didactic or bland or facile
It’s not that I’m a bad writer the critic wrote about my last book rather I appear to be writing as a “bad” writer on purpose
I never thought of myself as being a bad writer on purpose but as soon as the critic said this a light bulb went off I must think of myself as being a bad writer on purpose and then everything changed I wrote a bad book on purpose and it was the best book I ever wrote and I won a big prize and I was invited to give a reading at Harvard
I am flexible and I mold my so-called aesthetic choices to satisfy the criteria of the basest members of my audience
The poet didn’t know if being a poet meant being the best/worst version of himself or the best/worst version of someone else
The object of a poem he used to say is to try to put every possible thing into the poem so that the poem is not so much a poem but a container for the entire world and in this way there might eventually be no distinction between living and writing and art and life and art and death and the world as we know it and the world we desire and the world we despise
Unitedstatesians are obsessed with privacy Is that your chocolate in my peanut butter?
Every line I’ve ever written is a version of another line I’ve ever written and sometimes I write the same lines over and over again to see if they sound different in a different context
As a child I spent fourteen hours a day watching television
Is that your chocolate in my peanut butter?
They say the poet went crazy but it was just back spasms that triggered a series of medications and hallucinations which led to him being admitted into a psychiatric hospital named after a nineteenth-century war criminal
Is a bear Catholic?
Does the pope shit in the woods?
He classified my poem as a bad imitation of Vicente Huidobro's "Monumento al Mar" but in reality it was nothing like Huidobro or perhaps it was a bit like Huidobro if Huidobro wrote about psychoanalysis death metal the television show Twin Peaks a device to detect drugs hidden in the gastrointestinal tracts of border crossers the unpsoken relationship between Moses and his more talkative brother Aaron Kafka's short story "A Report to an Academy" and getting your cell phone stolen while stepping out of the metro in downtown Santiago on your way to lunch at a restaurant that used to be in the house where Vicente Huidobro lived as a child
I recognize that some readers will feel alienated by a reference to a poem they haven't read by a writer they haven't read but I'm not choosy or pretentious and mostly I believe that words and names are interchangeable
I like the flow of your poem but I have no idea what any of it actually means
He classified my poem as a bad of imitation of Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the thing with feathers yet he told me I did such a good job of writing a bad imitation that he could not forego giving me the highest possible marks on the assignment
A phrase as simple as “I hate your fucking guts” can mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people
It was the end of a long evening and the poet was feeling generous so he gave me a thumb drive with decades' worth of unpublished writing a memoir a novel three or four collections of poems and told me to do whatever I want with them
I’m dying frankly and I think it would be great for your career if you put your name on some of the better poems and send them out for publication
According to brittanica.com there is a form of torture called “Crushed by Elephant” which is when a prisoner is placed on the ground in front of an elephant and crushed by it
But I’m warning you if you google “Crushed by Elephant” you will feel as if the entire internet already knows that people have been crushed by elephants for centuries and it might be more beneficial to search for scaphism the ancient practice of a sealing a victim between two boats feeding him milk and honey covering his face with milk and honey so that flies swarm around his face and then as the victim defecates inside the boat flies and maggots “grow up inside” and slowly begin to devour his flesh
Now that the country is “teetering on dictatorship” the poets have come to believe that the subjectivity of subjective experience has a responsibility to be as ugly as the objectivity of objective experience
Awkward sentence bro
Time for another revision (82-7)
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
They take the children underground. They tie their hands behind their backs. They put the children in a cage. They tell the children: we have a vision for the future. We will blow up the river. You will blow up the river. Because it's too expensive to maintain it. Together we will blow up the river and we will fill it with pharmaceuticals. There are mufflers and tires floating in the river. There are plastic toys from Asia in the river. There are cell phones in the river. SIM cards and lithium batteries in the river. Cadmium in the river. Cobalt oxide and carbon graphite in the river. There are desperate laborers trying to cross the river. How much should we pay them? asks the authoritative bodies. Market rate? They will love us like we are their parents, say the authoritative bodies. They will protect the pharmaceuticals. They will protect the lithium. They will protect the cobalt. They will protect the carbon and the graphite. They will love the metals and minerals, the enzymes and acids, as if they were their most cherished friends and family. (113)
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
The hole they dig in the street is deep enough to fill with the bodies the police murder. They do not need to cram the bodies into the hole. The bodies fit comfortably into the earth. They do not need to squeeze the bodies into the hole. They do not need to burn the bodies. They treat the bodies better in death than they do in life. There is no decomposition. There is only composition. The dead bodies accumulate as if they are the currency that has long been promised by the agents of power and money. (116)
March 13, 2024
With "The Murmuring Grief of the Americas" Daniel Borzutzky has created a magnum opus for our time. While there are individual poems and sections, they are of a whole - indeed necessitate their counterparts in order to paint the complete picture of despair that we face with our world on the brink of the sixth extinction event via late capitalism, worldwide and electronic colonialism, and neoliberal state-sanctioned violence. Not for the faint of heart and written with those who want to face the reality of our existence head-on, Borzutzky's text is breathtaking, volatile, and glorious as he causes us to answer for turning a blind eye on border crises, economic and ecological emergency migration, police protection of property over people, loss of community and communication, and more. As a fellow depressed unitedstatian at my wit's end about all the accumulated losses, I cannot think of a better text as a guide through this purgatorial wasteland.
November 30, 2024
Every poetry collection from Borzutzky feels like part of same cinematic universe (Borzutzky Cinematic Universe, or BCU™️), where barbarians and the bourgeoisie are one and the same. Where horrors happen in the vast desert, alongside state lines, near the lake. Where battles are fought over ice and inside privatized prisons. Torture, corrupt policies, greedy economics, and immigration all swirl in Borzutzky's dystopian (yet all too modern) capitalistic hells. His past collections, and his newest, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, all feel like an ongoing brutal sequence. Seething, foaming at the mouth.
September 24, 2024
experimental, effective, staggering in its ability to capture what life is like in the “airbreathdeath theatre” of late capitalist, contemporary, absurdist Western life, and how our implicature in mass suffering and at the mercy of mass suffering strips us of humanity.
“I was a young language with no verbs”
“that’s not you talking / that’s the colonial axe in your head”
“it wonders what would have happened if modernity had been a green bird / instead of a nuclear bomb”
“I was a young language with no verbs”
“that’s not you talking / that’s the colonial axe in your head”
“it wonders what would have happened if modernity had been a green bird / instead of a nuclear bomb”
November 5, 2024
It's difficult to find a more apt read for the evening before the election. Grief is a complex emotion, and the author does a very good job of explaining and cataloguing his, as poem after poem bemoans and castigates the choices that led the America to this particular precipice. It's an elegy and an opprobrium to a historically significant and depressing AF reality. Simplistic in style and complex in ideas and emotions, this is a very interesting read.
December 29, 2024
3 1/2. No one surveys institutional rot and the essential police state dictated by our present global economy, but a bit more scattershot in style and form than is advisable. Borzutsky has a remarkably high floor, but this isn't my favorite from him.
February 5, 2026
we understand that the tradition of justice and the
tradition of injustice are simply bodies that break and
heal like the rest of us
there are ghosts dispersed through the undergrowth
of this country that can't stop burning (63).
tradition of injustice are simply bodies that break and
heal like the rest of us
there are ghosts dispersed through the undergrowth
of this country that can't stop burning (63).
June 3, 2024
Boo Capitalism
October 20, 2024
This was a totally unique poetry collection. The way Daniel Borzutzky writes into colonialism, the environment, the economy, and language is unlike any other poetry I've read before. His voice is so strong that each poem feels like a continuation of the last - rather than a set a discreet parts. I particularly liked the title poems - the first one in the collection and the array of shorter poems by the same name at the end of the book. Also: "Poem Written Under a Pseudonym" and "Sustainable Growth #205"
Want to Read
October 31, 2024This would probs annoy and interest me. found in greenlight bookstore.
April 8, 2025
Hmmm.
There was a lot of complex ideas but not necessarily a clear and deeper level of complexity that I was expecting from a title like The Murmuring Grief Of Ths Americas
There was a lot of complex ideas but not necessarily a clear and deeper level of complexity that I was expecting from a title like The Murmuring Grief Of Ths Americas
January 27, 2026
the poetry style was a little hard to follow at times BUT the themes, analogies, and raw descriptions of oppressive systems were written very well.
March 10, 2026
I really loved this book. I was sad when it ended. 😞😞😞
March 24, 2026
Recommended
Not being much of a poetry reader, I plowed straight through this book. I will be keeping an eye open for a hard copy to open whenever the muse takes me.
Not being much of a poetry reader, I plowed straight through this book. I will be keeping an eye open for a hard copy to open whenever the muse takes me.
January 17, 2026
Very stark, brutal and often depressing poems, but the fury underlying the language is really powerful
April 21, 2025
“We catalogued the glaciers before they disappeared
We returned the earth to the investors
The anxiety to the anxious
The babies to the umbilical cords
The blood to the state and the bank.”
We returned the earth to the investors
The anxiety to the anxious
The babies to the umbilical cords
The blood to the state and the bank.”
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews