The Anti-Grief

by Marianne Boruch

What to do with the everything crossing one’s path? Everything for and against, upside down and inside out, grief first then its dogged shadow life, which could be joy. In The Anti-Grief , Marianne Boruch challenges our conceptions of memory, age, and time, revealing the many layers of perception and awareness. A book of meditations, these poems venture out into the world, jump their synapse, tie and untie knots, and misbehave. From Emily Dickinson’s chamber pot to meat-eating plants, from an angry octopus to crowds of salmon swimming upstream, Boruch’s imagery blurs the line between natural and supernatural. And of course there is grief―working through grief, getting over grief, living with grief, and in these magnificent poems, anti-grief.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 8, 2019

About the author

Marianne Boruch is an American poet. She graduated from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1979, and after teaching at Tunghai University in Taiwan, and at the University of Maine at Farmington, went on to develop the MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University and was its director until 2005. She has taught there since 1987 as well as at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

Reviews

[Malaena · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don’t know if this book took me so long because i’m still in poetry slump or because i also had the chance to work with / meet Marianne last summer at a writers workshop, so i sat with them longer than usual… i think it’s a little bit of both.

I am so honored to have met her. In person, she is as sharp and witty as her poems. You can tell she has studied the people she has mentioned throughout her work, (Keats, Berryman, O’Conner, Bishop, etc.) because her line breaks feel like they are cut with an exacto knife. And after working with her for a couple days and seeing her read at the conference, it was such a joy to read her poems and hear them in her voice. She is so playful with words and images, that I actually read this collection primarily out loud (normally I’ll just read a couple.)

But Marianne is shrewd, witty, no nonsense, spirited, and kind — and her poems are exactly the same. She has me thinking about acorns, and paintings, and Alaska in ways I haven’t before. More so, from a craft perspective, it is clear she has devoted her life to her erudition in poetry. I will use her etymology poems, her ekphrastic poems, her use of ellipsis, and more as inspiration for my own work for the rest of time.

[nini · Rating 3 out of 5]

someone queue honeymoon fades .. i hope this keeps up with me i keep having a good time in your good times 🧸

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Day 15 of The Sealey Challenge / themes of memory, death, silence.
Boruch has many other collections that I am intrigued to explore.

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 5 out of 5]

This slim-but-dense collection is wily. It starts off with a nod toward pastoral/natural, but veers back to more intensely personal, and then jumps again to a few historical gems. So many turns of phrase were memorable in and of themselves ("like children but with no child inside"), but after reading so much poetry that is fleeting fragments, these lines cohere. As a measure of Boruch's talent, there is a Holocaust poem, a genre I think is terrifically difficult to pull off. Boruch pulls it off through a combination of bleak reportage, almost-humor, deft and even sympathetic character studies of the workers at Bergen-Belsen, and a closing refrain riffing off the word grip (as in valise) that is as tight as a fist.

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Based on the enthusiastic review I read, I expected to enjoy this collection and connect with it much more than I did. (Perhaps I should have started with earlier works from Marianne Boruch. This was our introduction.) I loved two poems, including the title poem, in their entirety. There were phrases and singular turns of words that grabbed me in other poems, but also entire pages that left me cold.

What I savored:

"At noon, the fog has no memory of fog, the trees I walked or wanted to. Like the pencil never recalls its least little mark, the dash loved, the comma that can't, can not dig down what its own brief nothing means on the page. I don't understand death either." Pieces on the Ground

"Ugh. Such earnestness in the world is exhausting." That Thing

"Promise and threat go on because one has to prophesy to make any sense of tragedy. I take the point: beware. Clots can, keep doing, and infection knows the best place. Wound

"The shock, reading that when young, when I read like never again." The Offering

"Pick up a pen and those hundreds of dull and ravishing words used to death flood back. Honor everything. And shred and merge and burn." Genuine Fakes

"I saw Amelia Earhart there, climbing into her deathtrap. But she didn't know yet, did she? ... Would she come to supper, talk offhand of favorite disasters, the wretched state of the world and so on? And leave her flight jacket behind on a chair." The Ache

"See? What you write, writes you back." Women

"Consider how even a lousy lowly virus spellbinds and draws in the body like a shaman rearing up before fire as wolf and tooth." Justice and Mercy

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly some powerful pieces here (William Blake, Nocturne) and a clever eye at work, rhythm is tight and staccato, but couldn't connect with many of the themes.

[Shel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delicious.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it for "Keats is Coughing" alone. Will certainly return to this one.

[Maren · Rating 5 out of 5]

might be my favorite boruch yet!! but many more to read