Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator, and the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, Memories of My Overdevelopment, and The Book of Interfering Bodies. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia won the 2017 National Translation Award. Other translations include Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks and Song for His Disappeared Love, and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl. He lives in Chicago and teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Judges’ Citation
Daniel Borzutzky’s Lake Michigan is an elegant and chilling masterpiece of dramatic speech in a tradition of activist, political poetry that encompasses works as diverse as Pablo Neruda’s Canto General and Peter Dale Scott’s Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror.
Daniel Borzutzky’s Lake Michigan is an elegant and chilling masterpiece of dramatic speech in a tradition of activist, political poetry that encompasses works as diverse as Pablo Neruda’s Canto General and Peter Dale Scott’s Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror. One of the theses embodied in its multiplicity of voices might be said to be that state-sponsored (or state-acquiescent) violence creates ghosts – ghosts who, by continued speaking, come to stand in for the people from whose histories they have been created, people who are therefore never truly dead. Technically brilliant in its use of repetition and variation, leavened with touches of embittered, and yet, in the end, resilient, drollness, Lake Michigan is an eloquent, book-length howl, a piece of political theatre staged in a no-man’s land lying somewhere between the surreal and the real.
Selected poems
by Daniel Borzutzky
The bodies are on the beach
And the bodies keep breaking
And the fight is over
But the bodies aren’t dead
And the mayor keeps saying I will bring back the bodies
I will bring back the bodies that were broken
The broken bodies speak slowly
They walk slowly onto a beach that hangs over a fire
Into a fire that hangs over a city
Into a city of immigrants of refugees of dozens of illegal languages
Into a city where every body is a border between one empire and another
I don’t know the name of the police officer who beats me
I don’t know the name of the superintendent who orders the police officer to beat me
l don’t know the name of the diplomat who exchanged my body for oil
I don’t know the name of the governor who exchanged my body for chemicals
The international observers tell me I’m mythological
They tell me my history has been wiped out by history
They look for the barracks but all they see is the lake and its grandeur the flowering
gardens the flourishing beach
The international observers ask me if I remember the bomb that was dropped on my village
They ask me if I remember the torches the camps the ruins
They ask me if I remember the river the birds the ghosts
They say find hope in hopefulness find life in deathlessness
Locate the proper balance between living and grieving
I walk on the lake and hear voices
I hear voices in the sand and wind
I hear guilt and shame in the waves
I have my body when others are missing
I have my hands when others are severed
I hear the children of Chicago singing We live in the blankest of times
Copyright © 2018, Daniel Borzutzky
Lake Michigan, Scene 3
The golden sand of Lake Michigan was here
The chromium spilled from the US Steel plant in Portage, Indiana was here
The raw sewage was here
The animal waste was here
The waters that in the sunlight reminded Simone de Beauvoir of silk and flashing diamonds were here
The seagulls were here
The liquid manure was here
The birds colonized by E. coli were here
The police removing the homeless bodies on the beach were here
The police removing the illegal immigrants on the beach were here
The police beating the mad bodies on the beach were here
The public hospitals were not here and the police had nowhere to take the sick ones to so they kicked them in the face handcuffed them and took them to jail
A woman screamed and the external police review board heard nothing
No one heard the woman screaming and no one saw the children vomiting
No vomiting children wrote the external review board no dead or decaying animals
The members of the external police review board belong to the Democratic Party and they love to play with their children on the beach
They belong to the ACLU and they love to play with their pets on the beach
They volunteer at their kids’ schools and they don’t believe in the bones of the disappeared
The pigs colonized by E. coli were here
The cattle colonized by E. coli were here
The humans colonized by E. coli were here
The police were here and they murdered two boys and the external police review board saw nothing
Copyright © 2018, Daniel Borzutzky