Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018

Toward the end of his striking latest, Borzutzky (In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy) writes, “I pray for an endless elegy today.” Part elegy, part protest, Borzutzky’s writing doesn’t “worry about the wound the poem must fit neatly into today.” Rather, he offers a panoramic and formally various investigation of the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy: “There is a mood of terror in the capitals of the industrialized democracies.” Terror and violence pervade each poem; in “Day #423,” he writes: “Grief covers my body with shame.” Above all, these pages capture the pain of being alive, and the reality that it is “the living who are dying of so much living,” as they endure loss, debt, anxiety, and fear. In the final line of “Take a Body and Replace it With Another Body,” Borzutzky captures the endless and ordinary pain of life in America: “I bloomed unspectacularly into the debt of the American night.” Borzutzky’s arresting writing sings and stuns as it addresses difficult, painful truths. (Mar.)