Cadaver, Speak

Marianne Boruch

Some books begin as a dare to the self. Marianne Boruch’s newest collection, Cadaver, Speak, is an unsettling double, a heart of two chambers. The first half is attuned to history—how time hits us, and grief—and to art and its making. The second half, the title sequence, is spoken by a ninety-nine-year-old who donated her body for dissection by medical students, a laboratory experience in which the poet, duly silenced, was privileged to take part. Born from lyric impulse, which is Boruch’s scalpel, her work examines love, death, beauty, and knowledge—the great subjects of poetry made new by a riveting reimagining.

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ISBN: 9781556594656

Format: Paperback

Old Paintings

Someone always lifted into heaven—
the Son, Mary, the Holy Ghost in perpetual
hover, any number
of saints alone. Or a murder of them,
those martyrs, their gorgeous flight north
reward for fire, for stones, hot breath in the ear.
Tooth and claw, human style,
down centuries like a drip.

Night trains now, one from Milano to Roma,
blue blanket, blue sheets in the sleeping car,
a sink, a shelf, all racketing, lurching
over mountain, vineyards, cutting goat trails in half.
Human nature. The ticket guy
won’t warn us about it: someone keeps trying
our locked door all night. I hear that.
Then I dream that.

Violent too, how the paintings
rest, gallery after gallery
at the Vatican. St. Sebastian, his arrows in deep,
up to their feathers. And the crucifixions—this is the deadest
dead Christ we’ve seen, my husband says, the skin
pasty gray unto green, the head lolling.
Then St. Bartholomew (my grade school named for him,
I walked through his door), he can’t unlove
being flayed, standard
pie plate of halo off-gassing golden behind him.
I thought that ended it, passing
into funny
because of distance. Could.

It didn’t. Not the train,
not the door and door all night,
the rattle, dark
window of it nailed right to the wall.

About the Author

Marianne Boruch’s ten previous collections include Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016), Cadaver, Speak (2014), The Book of Hours (2011), a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner, and her most recent, The Anti-Grief (2019). She has also published a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011) and three books of essays–In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005) and in the Michigan Poets on Poetry series, Poetry’s Old Air (1995) and The Little Death of Self (2016). Her works have appeared in The …

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Reviews

“Send a poet like Boruch to work in a cadaver lab and extraordinary poems come to life.” —Publishers Weekly

“Marianne Boruch’s work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: she sees and considers with intensity.” —Washington Post

“Boruch has always been a poet driven by curiosity, turning her wry, quizzical gaze on the ordinary world in order to uncover its essential strangeness, but this thematic focus takes her even farther in that direction… Boruch’s great achievement in this book, it seems to me, is how fully and precisely she engages the mysteries of consciousness and its relation to the body without foreclosing on any of its possibilities. When cadavers speak, we should listen.” —FIELD