“How do you quantify the murmuring grief of the Americas?” asked poet Daniel Borzutzky in his 2021 collection, Written After the Massacre of 2018, and he continues to ruminate on this question. The poems in The Murmuring Grief of the Americas continue to focus on opposition to capitalism, imperialism, and the casual midwestern racism that leads to migrant mistreatment.
Borzutzky’s three most recent collections garnered him acclaim and the titles of poems in his new book pay homage to those works, including the 2016 National Book Award-winning collection The Performance of Becoming Human and his 2018 Griffin Prize finalist, Lake Michigan. He divides this book into five sections, with the first four titles being variations of the plaintive question: “When Will I Be Human Again?” asks the first section title, and the next three replace “I” with “we,” “you,” and “they,” suggesting that humanity is in short supply.
The collection is bookended by titular poems, beginning with the prologue, “The Murmuring Grief of the Americas.” This poem includes a second stanza that prepares readers well for the bleak themes ahead,
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 there will be 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 focuses on the performative nature of capitalism and imperialism throughout his work, highlighting the harms behind the veneers. The poem tells of the children’s travail as a band of “patriots” chases and hunts them, “where the camera records one of them saying welcome to the promised land you little warthogs and there is gun shot.” The final stanza repeatedly mentions a “river of death,” bringing to mind stories of Chilean death squads filling rivers with bodies during the dictators of Augusto Pinochet; the period that led Borzutzky’s parents to immigrate to the United States and become, as he states it, “unitedstatsians,” highlighting an attitude harkening back to the Monroe Doctrine that all of the Americas are U.S. purview.
As in previous collections, Borzutzky employs simple but evocative compound words such as “timedeath” and “griefshame.” His speakers in this collection complicate language further with words like “airbreathdeath”—bringing to mind COVID or environmental pollution—and “earthstatebank” as skillful allusions to complex ideas. While compound words aren’t new to the poet’s work, the poem “Performance of Becoming Human #418,” brings the first mention of them combined with the idea of “theatres.” In a recent interview, Borzutzky explained that when composing this book, he thought of theatre “as a space of both performance and of violence.” The rest of his answer sheds light on the poem’s provocative subtitle, “Excuse Me, Sir, What Time Is the Massacre?”
“I imagined in these theatres that massacre was a predictable event,” Borzutzky told Third Coast Review, “one that was normalized and routinized, and one in which poetry was forced out of the body through air and breath and death. I thought a lot about the translation of breath, the road as a container of bodies and poetry, and the ‘innovation of extermination’ as a fundamental human invention.”
Borzutzky shows his influences with sectional epigraphs from poets including Emily Dickinson, César Vallejo, Clarice Lispector, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, and John Ashberry. The poem “Lake Michigan, Scene #1130” also features an epigraph quoting Pablo de Rokha, considered one of the greatest Chilean poets.
“Poem Written under a Pseudonym” is written after a cofounder of the Nuyorican movement, Pedro Pietri. In one of the poems reflecting on the COVID pandemic, the speaker writes, “I pick up the pineapple and smell it through my mask.” The poem alludes to a “104-year-old play,” involving nationalism, democracy, and dictatorship. The speaker mentioning an eviction from a commune after “one of those epic battles between the Communists and the Trotskyites” suggests the referenced “play” is the Russian socialist revolution and its aftermath, which had enduring effects on Latin Americans opposing capitalist oppression. In the same poem, Borzutzky shows another point of departure from recent collections with his use of untranslated Spanish; a growing trend from multilingual poets. While some may find this a problem—say, if they don’t have access to the internet or a Spanish-English dictionary—for readers like myself who consume books on tablets, and for bilingual readers, there’s a clear benefit to the poet expressing their thoughts in the language most appropriate.
“Lake Michigan, Scene #2022 {Nonessential Personnel}” again recalls the COVID pandemic, focusing on the higher price extracted from poor people of color, particularly migrants. Using prose blocks with spacing for cadence, the speaker writes, “they say you are nonessential bodies because / without you the city will not disintegrate.” It continues,
but what they do not tell us is that soon by necessity
we will become essential bodies responsible for
containment isolation reinvention documentation
simulation
The book’s fifth section is titled “Sustainable Growth” and focuses more on the environmental concerns in the “earthstatebank theatre.” The speaker of “Best Practices #1013” touches on cryptocurrency concerns and alludes to the possible dangers involved. Playing with Marx’s famous dictum about history repeating first as tragedy, then as farce, Borzutzky writes, “The rehumanization of the population repeats itself first as parody then as encryption.” The speaker of “Sustainable Growth #204” talks about the costs and profit margins of iPhone production, followed by the accusatory line, “No one saw how the workers were chained along the stretch of desert road.” The section and poem title’s meaning is alluded to first in a line one might find in a Marxist tract, “Private property sustains itself while creating dead bodies and inciting the revolution of the proletariat,” then in a later stanza featuring a stark observation on “sustainable capitalism” leading to unsustainable environmental conditions:
To get back to a 3 percent growth rate which most economists argue is necessary for sustainable capitalism we will need to destroy ourselves and the planet and the fathers and the sisters and the earth and the sea and the dolphins and political frameworks of the global south and the overdeveloped north and the underdeveloped east
Borzutzky ends the book with the epilogic section/poem titled, “The Murmuring Grief of the Americas,” consisting of six otherwise untitled prose blocks over as many pages. It starts with children in cages, their hands tied behind their backs with a mysterious “they” painting them a bleak picture,
They tell the children: we have a vision for the future. We will blow up the river. You will blow up the river. Because it’s too expensive to maintain it.
It goes on to explain that the river is filled with American consumer staples and conflict minerals, such as pharmaceuticals, cell phones, lithium batteries, cadmium, cobalt oxide, and carbon graphite. Another section tells of a man looking at “a _____ child he is about to shoot.” The child is put in a hole with mourners who murmur, dead bodies, and vague murmurers (presumably migrants) and taken on supervised shopping trips to Target.
After settling in a new location, the “authoritative bodies want to change the weather but their science is all wrong.” As with countless incidents of environmental and Indigenous destruction in the name of progress, the mourners are the ones to pay the true price:
When the town is obliterated by the flood, the murderers pay $150 million to rebuild it. But they cannot bring back the bodies who lay dead in the debris. Blessed are the hills that survive. Blessed are the hills that die.
While Borzutzky’s forceful stand against capitalism certainly won’t appeal to all readers, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas is a fine addition to the poet’s oeuvre and a timely warning as the United States prepares for the return of Donald Trump, who’s shown an affinity for billionaires and hatred for migrants; a situation especially alarming to a socialist, Jewish, Chilean-American poet. If you’re looking for something to cheer you up about the sad state of the world, this book definitely isn’t the one. However, it feels almost prescient for those who are steeling themselves against difficult times to come.