My review of Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of...

My review of Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human is finally live in a brand new issue of DIAGRAM (16.6):

“Why does Borzutzky suddenly look ‘better’ according to Burt? Is it
the fact that he was the recent recipient of a National Book Award? If
so, is that what also makes Borzutzky ‘more frightening’ and, therefore,
better now than before? In 2014, Burt described Borzutzky’s ‘having-it-both-ways’ style of writing as “self-righteous.” In the same
review, he also described the writing in The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011) as ‘vehement.’ Vehement poetry… Sounds frightening to me. After all, it’s not that Burt claimed that The Performance of Becoming Human was simply more frightening than The Book of Interfering Bodies.
Rather, it is ‘award-winner’ Borzutzky—the poet himself—who now ‘looks’
more frightening for some reason. Borzutzky’s collection of poems
opens with a body ‘congested with images of mutilation.’ Is Daniel
Borzutzky now ‘more frightening’ because a book of award-winning poetry
opens with a violence-clogged body moving among murmuring, decomposing
bodies.”