Reviewed by Cait O’Kane
My inflamed fingers are clacking keys in search of the precise definition of the word murmur. The screen in front of me states that a murmur is a soft indistinct sound spoken by a person or a group of people speaking quietly or at a distance. Distance, I think, is a good way to describe the voice of the poet Daniel Borzutzky, who I believe to be one of the most urgent, necessary, important, & truthful writers of this epoch. His new book The Murmuring Grief Of The Americas will be released in August by Coffee House Press. The title harkens back to Borzutzky’s 2015 work In The Murmurs Of The Rotten Carcass Economy. A murmur can upset a heart, can destroy a body, can turn a body into a carcass. An economy can turn a country into a company, a company into a prison, & a prison into a mass grave. Indeed, nature itself is, for Borzutzky, a “devouring Economy.” Borzutzky writes in a heteroglossia of the personal, public, private, political, corporate, institutional, academic, medical, carceral, and financial, and the result is not a cacophony but a terrible/terribly human American web, a territory both concrete & liminal, which he calls the “airbreathdeath theatre” & the “earthstatebank theatre.”
I inhabit these theaters distinctly, indebted & overworked, no day off for months, ragged breaths from my emphysemic lungs, the heaviness of my hands playing across the keys. The screen goes on to say that as a verb, to murmur is to say something in a low, soft, or indistinct voice. I am looking up certain words necessary to Borzutzky’s poetic web because I am recovering from a concussion sustained at work and a cardiac arrhythmia induced by systemic lupus erythematosus. I work cleaning the condos that are developing—the corporate loan word for gentrifying—my neighborhood. I am struggling to comprehend words & how they move together, what they mean together, how to say what I want to make them mean by moving my fingers over a plastic keyboard painted a faux-metallic gray.
The words & cursor undulating on the screen in front of me look sinister and menacing. The words sinister and menacing could also describe Borzutzky’s oeuvre, as his style is anything but indistinct. While his words may seem to come from a remove—a reporting and indexing of emergencies large & small, plagues, suicides, massacres, floods, earthquakes, sinkholes, groundwater poisoning, lost bank cards, stolen data, closed storefronts, threatening emails, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, terror, grief, fear, tedium, loneliness, futility, debt, & death—in between these indices are personal confessions. Consider “Secret Code #306”:
I’m sick of being alive but I’m too afraid to die
(is it ok to tell you this?)
you can look into the sky and see a thread that connects your body to the planets and the stars
I don’t know what that means but I suspect it might
be true
But even the poet’s confessions are subject to interrogation by an authoritative body, whether by the speaker’s own hypervigilance interrupting the confessional stanza, or as is the case in “Poem Written Under A Pseudonym,” an interruption by the living on behalf of the dead:
You think your poems don’t matter at all and that no one reads them or cares about them then one day you get an email from a woman you’ve never met before telling you that her husband read your last book then killed himself and in the suicide note he keeps quoting lines from your poems and she thinks you should know because you might want to take the book out of circulation to prevent others from having to bury the people in their lives they love most.
Circulation—the screen in front of me defines it as movement to & fro or around something, especially that of fluid in a closed system. I think of Borzutzky’s words as a necessary inoculation against apathy & complacency, against silence & suicide. The body as commodity and as metaphor figures large in TMGOTA— antibodies have royalties, the poet speculates over the prospective
worth of his anatomy, severed from the body as a whole, and what the condition of his mind says about the worth of his body:
What does my face cost?
I need seven dollars for lunch
Metadata says I bought too many books about mental illness What?
What does my condition cost?
I need to assess the metadata on my skin
How much for these knuckles?
How much for these ankles?
Even the textual “data” of Borzutzky’s book is divided into sections, like a corpse upon a coroner’s table. The eponymous opening poem depicts a reality show wherein exhausted immigrant children are hunted for sport by “patriots” after crossing a river.
don’t die
the director says to the children
if you die we won’t be able to make this film
and if we don’t make this film then there is no evidence that once you were alive and if there is no evidence that once you were alive
then no one will know that we loved you.
Borzutzky implies here that to the viewing audience – us – that the verbs to love & to film are synonymous. Think about what it means to “capture” something on camera—the faces of weeping Gazan children, bloodied & battered & hungry & weary & worn, on all of our Timelines, come to mind. We are told that the IDF (& our own military, in the tunnels, silent as a virus) is killing them to capture Hamas militants. People say in comments sections underneath the articles about the conflict—they call it a conflict, or a war, never a program, never a genocide, no, not that—that seeing the faces of these children helps to humanize them for those on the other side. What if this “other side” is only a screen? What if we are only capturing them, collecting their grief to catalog?
The next four sections are headed under different permutations of the question “WHEN WILL I/YOU/WE/THEY BE HUMAN AGAIN?” This question of the qualia of humanity, the body, mind, soul, and spirit—how they live, what they are worth—are central to Borzutzky’s work. This question of worth is not just metaphor, but literal: “What does it mean to you,” he asks “the starving child eating garbage in the ruins/ what does it mean to you/ the bloodwords in the statemouths….what does it mean to you/ the diseased water, the diseased breath, the diseased lung?” “Every line I have ever written is a version of another line I’ve ever written,” Borzutzky admits in the poem “How I Wrote Certain Of My Books.” There are words & phrases & images & parts of speech that he returns to again and again, the questions of What and of How Much, the anaphoric repetition of conjunctions,
particularly but & and, the abstraction of debt as a concrete and crushing reality, along with the menace of the screen.
you begin with debt and you end with debt and when there is no debt you don’t know what to do Because all you have ever known is debt
Screen is both a noun & a verb, an action & an object to be performed & projected. Even Borzutzky’s epigraphs are placed at intervals around the pages dividing sections, functioning as a kind of cursor: blinking influence, blinking image. Clarice Lispector’s line “I shall miss myself so much when I die” recurs throughout the text as an epigraph. This concept of missing the self, the living self among the dead, is present in the last section of TMGOTA, bookending the eponymous poem beginning the collection. The surviving children from the reality show are now in cages underground. They are interrogated by “authoritative bodies.” Their names and ethnicities and nationalities are left only _____, the missing selves already dead, “a reduction in the blankness of blank.”
One morning a man looks at a _________ child he
is about to shoot. He sees a structure he cannot build into his life…he sees the cancer of the past reasserting itself into an organism of the present. The organism weeps. The sky weeps. The grass weeps. And the man cannot build this weeping into his life. So he puts the __________ child into the hole with the mourners.
But he doesn’t like the language in which the mourners grieve…he wants to own their pain….he wants to own the murmurs they make…
Authoritative bodies own debt & grief & debt. They own nature and disaster, ruin, pain, sadness, fear, exhaustion, hunger. They own everything.
They are happy.
They cannot countenance grief, the grief that murmurs through the beating heart of Capital, the blood money pouring from our imperial wound. Borzutzky’s words get inside this wound, the war-wound, the world-wound, the wired wound of forced Connectivity, & they gnaw. They fester & they grow. They multiply. May we never become inoculated to them, to the sear on the page and the mark on the soul. My own body attacks itself, debt-swollen, antibody heavy. My head swims; my hands are hot to the touch. As I finish writing this, the West’s own traveling terror tour of rebels-for-hire, the ISIS-K variant, have massacred Muscovites in a concert hall. Palestinian children are starving to death, limbs amputated with no anesthetic, families and friends bombarded again & again & again by heavy Western weaponry. Prisoners in the United States of America are drinking water contaminated with human waste. The covid bioweapon continues to maim & disable & kill, & the cure we were sold continues to do the same under a shroud of edited headlines. Bodies line the avenue behind my crumbling rowhome, their arteries shredded from toxic cocktails of fentanyl & xylazine. Billboards on public
transit implore our impoverished bodies to work for the Bureau of Prisons. I have Grief, yes, that Murmurs in my leaky heart, rendering me breathless & awake.
“Excuse me, sir, what time is the massacre?” Borzutzky asks repeatedly throughout TMGOTA—and I think I know. It is unfolding, always, in an awful & eternal Now.
Cait O’Kane is a writer & digital photographer living in Philadelphia, where she was born. Her first collection of poetry, A Brief History Of Burning, was published by Belladonna Press Collective in 2020. Her subsequent chaplet “Homecoming” was published by Belladonna in 2023. Cait has previously contributed to Tripwire issues 17 & 19 & is honored to review the revolutionary work of a revolutionary writer in a revolutionary magazine.
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas is published by Coffee House Press
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