Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018

by Daniel Borzutzky

In Written after a Massacre, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unfair policing of certain kinds of bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy. He grieves for the children in cages and the martyrs of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburg. But pulsing amid Borzutzky's outrage over our era's tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

120 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 2, 2021

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

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I look at Borzutzky's growing body of work as exactly that: one singular growing body of work. His books melt and seep and trickle into his other books, full of ghosts from previous breaths. A poet of repetition, barbarianism, politics, economics, and so much more. This book is a violent nightmare full of bodies and place. It wants so badly to shake and slap the hate out of this wasteland.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniel Borzutsky’s latest collection is focused and direct, proof that poetry can be a powerful lens through which to view the present. Writing about white supremacy, US immigration policy, politics, and antisemitism, Borzutsky pulls no punches against the powers that be. There wasn’t a lot of nuance here, although perhaps bluntness is what our times call for.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes you have to read a collection in a single sitting, heart in throat. No words for a review; this is incendiary, written in part “to the love that survives.” “I dream of an economy where one arrested immigrant is replaced with / one dead banker.”

[fer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read and reviewed this collection for a CRW class and I can only recommend it. Borzutzky writes extremely raw and bold poetry. I don't know that I can do this collection justice in a review, but if you see this, you should read it!

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll eat bread I’ll eat rice and kiss my child and say thank you thank you thank you
To salt and to sweat and to boredom let
Peace explode on my body I am alive and condemned and undone

(from “Day #423”)

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was released during the covid isolation, and I was able to attend two zoom book releases. The first included guest poets Edwin Torres and Cecilia Vicuna.
Cecilia Vicuna gave an incredible reading of a couple of Daniel Borzutzky's poems. Look for it on YouTube.

This book is divided into three sections, the third from which the title is taken is most moving and powerful to me. Also, read the author's end note which begins: "We live in a country of massacre, shaped by a history of white-supremacist massacre, of police-and-state massacre, that rages on into the present.

Daniel Borzutzky is a truth teller.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The apocalypse is not when the world ends; it's when one single person is killed. The entire universe becomes deformed when one single person is tortured."

Borzutzky wrote this in part during the great covid isolation of 2020. In it, he covers the systemic policing of marginalized bodies, free market dogmas and the unjust policing of others. There's another review here that writes how his works act as the growing of a larger body and I would wholeheartedly agree. After reading Lake Michigan (his prior work) covering the secret location that the Chicago Police Department would take hostages for secret integrations and torture, I thought it'd be hard to top that. Borzutzky seems to be becoming more brutal in his delivery and prose with every publication. It's clear - he still has so much more to say and I'll be there to read whenever he writes.

[a interview conducted by Borzutzky]

"In a recent interview published at Harriet I asked Raúl to comment on this:

DB:Returning to the idea that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their aftermaths are happening at the same time and in the same space as the Chilean dictatorship, it seems to me that inside of this there is an argument: that human atrocities cannot be separated.

RZ:I have the sense that any victim of violence, of war, of torture, of bombings is a failure for all of humanity. If you are being tortured, or if you are being killed, it can be in the United States, it can be in Vietnam, that situation is a disaster for all of humanity. Thus this great disaster is transformed in a quotidian manner….The apocalypse is not when the world ends, it’s when one single person is killed, when one person is tortured, in reality it’s the entire universe that becomes deformed. I think those things are present in there…a tortured Chilean or Argentine, or a child being killed by napalm in Vietnam, or someone trying to escape from the Twin Towers, or someone in a concentration camp, it’s the same thing; it’s the same terror; and it’s reiterated and reiterated and reiterated as if it never stops happening. I think that poetry and art have to narrate those things, to speak them, and at the same time, to believe that they might be able to exorcise them…"

[AngieA Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are powerful words in this collection of poems and they are combined in a powerful way. A way that makes this white woman uncomfortable; as it should be. My challenge this year has been to read harder. This was hard to read on many levels. The free verse style itself if hard for me to read. The depth of meaning is hard for me to read. The subject matter is hard for me to read. Some of the writing I did not understand; I could not get past the surface of the words; the symbolism lost on me. But some things were blatant; easy. "Risk Management" page 14.

...there is a mood of terror in the capitals of the industrialized democracies
we'll jump off that bridge when we get there...
there will be more volitility but we will welcome the short-term pain if it leads to long term gain

Economic policy; gun violence; immigration. We think of ourselves as a civilized nation, but we are not civil. While the poems-for-publication had an effect on me, the real impact was had in the End Note. The title of the collection comes from the Tree of Life shooting at a synogogue. The poet has a personal connection to the congregation there but extrapolated that experience to our wider culture.

Perhaps we are always, and have always been, writing after a massacre

How much have we really evolved as human beings and why can't we just love each other? Read this book.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author found his metier quite early. There are seldom poets who address the distribution of power in the world with an anti-imperialist bent. (Honestly, most of them, even the presumably "avant-garde" ones, are toothless liberals.) Borzutsky on the other hand forges the rhetoric of State Dept. briefings and think-tank language in his highly politically conscious smithy. (John O'Leary's Keywords drills down into such rhetoric pretty effectively.) I found this book grim but also hilarious, with ,ore hilarity than the earlier ones; these effects are only enhanced by his deployment of repetitions. The massacre to which he refers is the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, but the subjects range from police crackdowns in Chile and the United States and elsewhere. It's far different than the abstract lyric that came into being in the new century.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just absolutely, breathtakingly wonderful. Borzutsky’s command of language and vocabulary is among the greatest of all time. Probably one of the most important things I’ve ever read.

Marines medicate mothers and mix their milk with
mononucleosis. Millionaires multiply
in the machinery of mourning, manufacturing
mausoleums for martyred Marxists in Mercedes.
Middle managers mistake manipulative
merchants for munificent moralists. A military
massacre on the municipal motorway is like
a military massacre on the municipal motorway.
Metaphysical mayors mediate the mythology
of mystical markets while monitoring the murders of migrants.

My mouth is filled with worms.

[Cliff.Hanger.Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have nothing but good words about this Little gem. Visceral and thoughtful, Borzutzky takes us through his thoughts and feeling on Zero-sum-capitalism and some truly brilliant Biopolitical arguments. This collection is emotionally heavy but worth it!

[Luke Gorham · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2. The best working poet not named Christian Wiman. Reviewedthis one for Library Journal.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Torn between 4 and 5 stars. The imagery invoked is very impactful, but I decided on 4 stars because I found it a bit repetitive -- though that served a purpose -- and I thought the End Note should have been in the beginning.

[Z666 · Rating 5 out of 5]

For all the love that survives, and for the names we do not know.

[Caio Maximino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Por todo o amor que sobrevive, e pelos nomes que não conhecemos.

[Eleanor Jude · Rating 2 out of 5]

With everything going on this book was too much for me.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Most of my writing life I have been trying to write poetry that grapples
with the various violences we witness, we live with, we absorb.
I have been trying to name the violence clearly and resist routinization
and bureaucratization.
I have been trying, as C. D. Wright says, “not to exonerate or aestheticize
immeasurable levels of pain.” —“End Note”

An unflinching poetic reckoning with past horrors that continue to plague the twenty-first century, this gritty collection is written in the great tradition of protest poets like Ginsberg and Levertov, yet without Levertov’s lyrical leavening or Ginsberg’s improvisational rhythmical style. Some poems sound like jackhammering or machine-gun fire, which is exactly what you’d expect in poetry of the revolution.

“The critic believed that because I avoided rhyme and meter I was under/ the illusion my verbal constructs were self-generated by nature”—“Dream Song #322”

Favorite Poems:
“The Crisis”
“End Note”