The Murmuring Grief Of The Americas w/ Daniel Borzutsky

Join East Bay Booksellers, Coffee House Press, and Gilman Brewing for the release of Daniel Borzutsky's latest poetry collection The Murmuring Grief of the Americas with the author in conversations with fellow poet Rachel Galvin.

In The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, 2016 National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky holds to account the private interests driving Western humanitarian decisions, laying bare the immense toll of exploitative labor practices and the self-serving nature of authoritative bodies. These powerful, musical poems explore our hemispheric grief under the yokes of labyrinthine immigration policies, militarized policing, and mass capitalism.

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“Daniel Borzutzky is one of the most urgent, necessary, important, & truthful writers of this epoch.” —Cait O’Kane, Tripwire"

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

"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

“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

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.

Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her third book of poems, Uterotopia, was published by Persea Books in 2023. Galvin is the author of Elevated Threat Level, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Pulleys & Locomotion. She is the translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets, winner of the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize, and co-translator of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poetry, a finalist for the National Translation Award. Her writing appears in journals and anthologies including Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best American Poetry 2020, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, a creative translation collective, and is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature Studies at the University of Chicago, where she also directs Translation Studies.

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