Jackson Poetry Prize

In poems rhetorically sinuous and compelling, Marianne Boruch renders luminous the expanse and reach of human thought. In an age of simulated intelligence, Boruch sets to tremble the whole of our collective knowledge where the soul, as she suggests in several poems, is a vastness of wanting and boundless curiosity. And thus, her poetry possesses an amazing range. Her tone slips adroitly from elegant phrasing to jaunty repartee, and over the course of her work, she has employed every register in between, often with moments of slightly unexpected syntax—not startling but awakening.

Boruch’s polished linguistic agility allows her work to show a strong empathic grasp of others’ experiences and situations while remaining rigorous and exacting, even, piercing—she gets below the surface of people and things but retains a compassionate objectivity. Stylistically, she is unique and constantly evolving. Over her eleven volumes of poetry, she has refined her voice to the point that it can convey the finest nuances of sensation and thought, from the philosophical to the humorous, from the agonizing to the absurd. Her content shows similar range; she evokes Pliny the Elder as gracefully as she does a cadaver, and though both are clearly dead, and she doesn’t exactly bring them back to life, she does make them present in ways that show that they matter.

A poem always takes you somewhere, and through her range, Boruch takes her readers to landscapes and mindscapes that feel both unprecedented and familiar at the same time. There’s an uncanny quality to her work that erases any possibility of complacency and yet also gives the reader a sense of stability, of standing on ground not only solid, but also important. She has spoken of poetry as “our oldest way to access the interior.” In her hands, it not only leads us to the interior, but shows us that there are many of them, as her language multiplies our own inner lives and the deep withins of the world around us.

With the compassion and reverence that comes with the pursuit of emptiness, Boruch also examines two of the most important and confounding issues of our time, the health of the natural world and the spiritual contexts of our uninhabited bodies. What is this vehicle we use to live our lives, and are we willing to lend our real attention to pe'ople such as the Indigenous Elders who take the stewardship of this gift of life seriously? It is Boruch’s keen intelligence and genuine concern that takes her to this work and brings back to us these gems that do not shrink from frankness, as she looks everywhere for what can help us see. To read Boruch is to constantly look up with eyes a little more widely open and think, yes!