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National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky pens an incandescent indictment of capitalism's moral decay.
In Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unjust policing of certain bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy, against hate spreading like a virus. He grieves for children in cages and those slain in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. 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. Borzutzky's strident language juxtaposes the horror of consumer-culture violence with its absurdity, and he masterfully shifts between shock and heartbreak over the course of the collection. Bleak but not hopeless, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 is an unflinching poetic reckoning with the twenty-first century.
Daniel Borzutzky is the author of several poetry collections, including The Book of Interfering Bodies; In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy; The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award; and Lake Michigan, a finalist for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the National Translation Award. He has also translated books by Chilean poets RaĂşl Zurita and Jaime Luis HuenĂşn. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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"picture a heart covered in dust and picture a poem sprouting out of it picture a heart covered in dust and picture a child chasing it" "Poem #1022" from Daniel Borzutzky's WRITTEN AFTER A MASSACRE IN THE YEAR 2018 at @NYTmag, selected by Anne Boyer. https://t.co/CUkBvWi50N
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Also in 2019, we published "Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018," a poem by Daniel Borzutzky, who grew up attending Tree of Life. https://t.co/OXKwrjJCTk
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“You carry a bag of stones around your neck and the stones are the state that raised you You carry a corpse around your neck and the corpse is the state that raised you” - Daniel Borzutzky’s “Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018” (@Coffee_House_) #TheSealeyChallenge https://t.co/7XF4l5XsQy