Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez's The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Praise for The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
Bookshop.org "100 Most Anticipated Books of 2024"

"Daniel Borzutzky is one of the most urgent, necessary, important, & truthful writers of this epoch." --Cait O'Kane, Tripwire

"It is going to take a devastatingly long time for the world to fully reckon with the beats in the heavy drums that one hears when tuning in to the books of Daniel Borzutzky. It takes a caring, tender, loving--deeply loving--human to write a book this searing. We're fools, we're complicit, we suffer. Skin and bones ache while reading. The heart riles up." --Sawako Nakayasu

"Art is always consumed with distinctions between the interior and the exterior of the self. Daniel Borzutzky belongs to the lineage of poets who refuse this demarcation. His poetry of anti-capital humanism converses with Canetti's Crowds and Power. In Borzutzky's hands, the modern cult of the individual is exposed as agent and puppet of the collective capitalist domination. But The Murmuring Grief of the Americas is also an aesthetic elation that quotes itself because it echoes so many others. It mixes the waters of the reverent with the irreverent." --Fady Joudah

"In The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, Daniel Borzutzky maps massacres and environmental disasters, recording corpses that accumulate like caches of personal data. We are nothing, he reminds us, to our nations, our corporations, and the earth that we desecrate. With wholly unmistakable precision and unrelenting vision, Borzutzky reveals the utter darkness of it all (nation, money, property) and our imperative to make something new from it." --Susan Briante

Past Praise:

Praise for Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018

Chicago Review of Books, "Must-Read Books for March

"A panoramic and formally various investigation of the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. . . . Borzutzky's arresting writing sings and stuns as it addresses difficult, painful truths." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Borzutzky handles history as liquid, the past a wave forever crashing into the present. . . . an urgently contemporary project, rejecting the pretense of retrospective distance in order to mourn from within chaos." --Hannah Aizenman, The New Yorker

Praise for Lake Michigan

Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, 2019

"A searing indictment and an immediate, dangerous, and urgent work." --Booklist

Praise for The Performance of Becoming Human

Winner of the National Book Award, 2016

"Like any good satirist, Borzutzky considers his subjectivity with the same lens he applies to the systems he critiques, and The Performance of Becoming Human is an apogee of that inquiry. Since The Book of Interfering Bodies, Daniel Borzutzky has been the fabulist we most need because he's unafraid to detail the truth of our oligarchy, without pedantry. In his figurative world our bodies are forced through privatized meat grinders, but funnily in the way that all dark horror stories trigger our gallows humor. I'm thrilled every time Borzutzky brings a book in the world, learn the most about reality from him." ―Carmen Giménez Smith

Publisher: Coffee House Press

Pub date: 2024-08-06

Length: 112 pages