Marianne Boruch embarks on a journey of dark wonder in The Figure Going Imaginary. A gathering of journal entries, lyrical prose, poetry, and sketches from the author’s “Life Drawing” notebook, this hybrid collection recounts the unnerving and otherworldly experience of studying Gross Human Anatomy and life-drawing at Purdue University—an experience that also fueled her 2014 collection, Cadaver, Speak. In the studio, it’s the music of “charcoal to paper, a netherworld sound” and learning to bring human models alive on paper. In the cadaver lab, its “flashing knives and probes and forceps” that focus on another kind of beauty, the body as “map, a tracing, evidence of a life.” Guided by “the ancient task of learning to see,” this poet explores drawing, fate, and at the fragile center of it all, the mysteries of the human figure.
ISBN: 9781556596940
Format: Paperback
In truth, this is a book of ammo toward poems. A fate not clear at all when these notes came to be, moment after moment observed in lab and studio and put to paper. It is, after all, not the finished product to be locked away with a key. This is the long haul behind certain poems, the wanna-be flying buttress for a book coming later and, as such, an example and perhaps of use to others who make poems or read them or ignore them completely and are just curious about what goes on in a so-called cadaver lab of a medical school. Or in a lifedrawing class where people stop time to invent on paper what they think or dream they see in the human figure in a rare moment, many moments, of stillness. Or to note in whatever jots and serious squibs what continues to lie in wait behind glass in museums of great cities and kept safe, ongoing bits of bone and history, elixirs no one believes in anymore, grim stories of death and rescue, outrageous evidence of surgery, healing know-how (or know-nothing) from prehistory through the Black Plague, inching toward us via crutch and childbirth and wars and centuries and both robust and toxic harvests—to what? Now? To our recent plagued months possibly turning into years?
Reviews
Praise for Marianne Boruch
“Boruch refuses to see more than there is in things—but her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler’s sense of facet and flaw.”—Poetry
“Boruch places the exceptional within the mundane and the intimate within the universal, and above all highlights the present moment without ever losing sight of a broader context in which now is just one moment among many.”—Publishers Weekly
“She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice.”—Robert Pinsky, Book World, The Washington Post
“Boruch displays a quietly gymnastic intellect in the examinations of art, the body, and the human condition.”—American Poets
“Her approach isn’t meant to fix or crystallize her ideas in any hard and fast light, but rather to present the music of her thinking… Boruch brings in personal memory and philosophical speculation, infusing much of this writing with slightly skewed skepticism and rueful uncertainty about one’s ability to be absolute about anything.”—Trinity University Press