Marianne Boruch: In Pursuit of Emptiness
“It’s spooky,” Marianne Boruch says of the years-old Poets & Writers magnet that turned up in a spurt of spring cleaning. Under the familiar logo is a sticker, evidently peeled from a prescription bottle, that warns: May Cause Dizziness. “Who knew it would become a prophecy?” It was only a few days later that the executive director of Poets & Writers called with “shocking news beyond belief.” Boruch had been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize.
Awarded annually to recognize an American poet of exceptional talent, the Jackson Poetry Prize was established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation and is named for the John and Susan Jackson family. The $100,000 award makes it one of the most generous prizes awarded to a U.S. poet. Boruch is the twentieth poet to receive the prize; prior winners include U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.
Boruch is an emeritus professor of English at Purdue University, where she founded the MFA program and taught for more than thirty years. She has written eleven books of poetry, most recently Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as essays, memoir, and hybrid work. Her previous honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and numerous fellowships. She describes her poetry as seeking out “surprise and nerve,” and she makes a practice of studying the unfamiliar, often traveling—literally and imaginatively—to see what presents itself in the Australian outback, an ancient city, or the human cadaver lab at Purdue. She is looking forward to her upcoming Fulbright in Norway at the University of Oslo’s RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion. When asked about her practice, she focuses on an openness to and curiosity about “the world urgently offering itself, as a gift. You never boss the poem around. You let it happen to you.”
The poets Major Jackson, Cole Swensen, and Afaa Michael Weaver served as judges for the 2026 prize. “With the compassion and reverence that comes with the pursuit of emptiness,” they wrote in their citation, “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. … To read Boruch is to constantly look up with eyes a little more widely open and think, yes!”
Despite her literary accolades, Boruch eschews the idea of a poetry “career,” offering instead the advice she gives her students: “The marketplace side of all this is like raising tropical fish, a hobby. The writing itself [is] the heart and soul.”
“Place yourself outside of human time when you sit down to write,” she advises. “Love both language and silence in equal parts, the way they sound and how they go dark. Keep staring at your poems as you revise. Read them aloud over and over. Visit them. Do hospital rounds on them, day after day. Slowly detach yourself. Figure out not what they are trying to say but what they’re trying to understand. That takes a while, and at times you can’t know completely. (Maybe those are the real poems, the ones with a secret life and hunger apart from you.)”
Poets & Writers will celebrate Boruch and the Jackson Poetry Prize on September 29 at an event at the Greene Space in New York City, where she will be in conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama and read from her work. For more information about attending in person or virtually, visit pw.org/JacksonPrize.
Boruch: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey; magnets: Marianne Boruch