The Murmuring Grief of the Americas

by Daniel Borzutzky

“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.

Genres: Poetry, American History

119 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 6, 2024

About the author

Daniel 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.

Reviews

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhfnU...

[Alexander Pyles · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jesse Hassinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

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”

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Luke Gorham · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Morgan Fulton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boo Capitalism

[Nikita Ladd · Rating 4 out of 5]

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"

[Glennie]

This would probs annoy and interest me. found in greenlight bookstore.

[Binx Perino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I forgot to mention that I interviewed this poet!

https://thirdcoastreview.com/2024/09/...

[Khepre · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[Elizabeth B · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75

[m.e. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“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.”