About Marianne Boruch
Marianne Boruch, born on June 19, 1950, is an American poet whose body of work encompasses not only poetry but also essays that explore the art of poetry in connection with various disciplines such as music, visual arts, ornithology, medicine, and aviation, as well as a memoir detailing her hitchhiking journey in 1971. She is the winner of the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize. Awarded annually by Poets & Writers to an American poet of exceptional talent, esteemed poets Major Jackson, Cole Swensen, and Afaa Michael Weaver, who served as judges, wrote of Boruch’s work: “In poems rhetorically sinuous and compelling, Marianne Boruch renders luminous the expanse and reach of human thought.”She has published several collections, such as Bestiary Dark (2021), The Anti-Grief (2019), Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016), Cadaver, Speak (2014), and The Book of Hours (2011) published by Copper Canyon Press, as well as Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), and Poems: New & Selected (Oberlin College Press, 2004). Her memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011), recounts a hitchhiking journey she undertook in 1971. Additionally, she has written prose collections focused on poetry, including The Little Death of Self (University of Michigan Press, 2017), In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity University Press, 2005), and Poetry’s Old Air (University of Michigan Press, 1995). Boruch’s lyric poetry frequently extracts an ordinary moment from its context, unraveling threads of thought and routine with a perspective that is both wry and unwavering.
Her poems and essays have been published in numerous journals and magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, The London Review of Books, The Massachusetts Review, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, The Nation, Narrative, FIELD, Poetry 180, Poets of the New Century, Poets Reading: The FIELD Symposia, Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Poets, American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets, and Best American Poetry, among others.
Boruch's poetry stands out for its unique way of transforming everyday life into a mystery. Her work mixes very quiet observation with magical surprises but what characterizes most her poems is above all calm and precise attention. She looks at the world with patience and focuses on ordinary details that others do not see while using simple and exact words, without artificial effects.
Originality of her poetry
One of her great talents is the art of surprise. She often begins with an ordinary scene (like observing a bird or a neighbor) and then drifts to deep and almost magical thoughts. Her texts mix poetry with other sciences such as medicine, ornithology (the study of birds), or history and the most striking thing with every of her words is the fluidity of the moving mind. When you read one of her poems, you have the impression of following her thoughts as they are being made, with sudden detours and awareness. She refuses to give ready-made answers or morals and prefers to remain honest in the face of grief, memory, and passing time. To write, she often uses the “begging bowl” method: she empties her mind of all expectation and simply waits for the outside world to dictate the poem to her.Famous Poems and Books
Among her best poems is Little Fugue, which is one of her very famous texts where she compares the learning of music by children to her own way of writing to tame the little sorrows of life. Another poem, Snowfall in G Minor, is a magnificent text from her collection Grace, Fallen From, which transforms a simple snowfall into a reflection on beauty that passes. Among her most significant collections is The Book of Hours. This major collection received the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She draws inspiration from the prayer books of the Middle Ages to explore modern life with gravity and humor. Cadaver, Speak... is also one of her most original works. She slipped into a medical dissection course at the university to give the floor to a body given to science. Bestiary Dark is the most recent of her books: A collection from a trip to Australia where she poignantly describes wildlife (such as emus or kangaroos) in the face of fire and human cruelty. After the Moon: A short acclaimed poem that evokes the disappearance of light during an eclipse and the human inability to understand everything.She resides in West Lafayette, Indiana, with her husband.
Browse all poems and texts published on Marianne Boruch
A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.
