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Summary
Summary
Finalist for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize
From the author of The Performance of Becoming Human , winner of the National Book Award for poetry
Lake Michigan , a series of 19 lyric poems, imagines a prison camp located on the beaches of a Chicago that is privatized, racially segregated, and overrun by a brutal police force. Thinking about the ways in which economic policy, racism, and militarized policing combine to shape the city, Lake Michigan 's poems continue exploring the themes from Borzutzky's Performance of Becoming Human , winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. But while the influences in this book (Césaire, Vallejo, Neruda) are international, the focus here is local as the book takes a hard look at neoliberal urbanism in the historic city of Chicago. Named a 2018 Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library.
Author Notes
Daniel Borzutzky is the author of a collection of fiction entitled Arbitrary Tales and a poetry chapbook entitled Failure in the Imagination. He also published full-length volumes of poetry including The Ecstasy of Capitulation, The Book of Interfering Bodies, and The Performance of Becoming Human, which won the National Book Award for poetry in 2016. He has translated a number of works by Chilean writers including the poet Jaime Luis Huenún and the author Juan Emas. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Koç University in Istanbul, and Wilbur Wright College of the City Colleges of Chicago.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Borzutzky's streamlined and unequivocally defiant follow-up to 2016's National Book Award-winning The Performance of Becoming Human unfolds across the streets of Chicago and along the shores of Lake Michigan, where he situates a fictionalized version of the Chicago PD's once-secret interrogation sites. Composed in long, proselike lines, this work explicitly places itself in the tradition of protest poetry, referencing such forebears as César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Aimé Césaire. Police brutality is a major theme, both as occasion for protest ("There are 7 of us in front of the mayor's house asking questions about the boy they shot 22 times") and enacted, as when "the police officers throw us to the ground hold their sticks to our necks put their knees to our backs pull our hair handcuff us take us to a holding cell where we are separated one from another and we cannot call our lawyers our friends our families and we scream from our cells until they tape our mouths shut." Authorities repeatedly attempt to normalize their brutality, claiming that this is "only war," that it is "only the beginning of war." Borzutzky engages with a history specific to Chicago, but the beach becomes a symbolic border zone where people suffer at the hands of capitalist power and, crucially, search for the means to fight back. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In his previous poetry collection, the National Book Award-winning The Performance of Becoming Human (2016), Borzutzky explores the myriad contortions the self undergoes in the privatized cellar of humanity, struggling against manipulative economic and political systems. Here he narrows his scope to a slightly mythologized Chicago, with its liberal mayor, privatized schools, and police murders. Arranged like a play in two acts, each with nine scenes, the book opens with the speaker protesting the murder of Laquan McDonald by staging a die-in on the mayor's front lawn. The protesters are beaten and kidnapped and taken to a police black site, reminiscent of the torture perpetrated by Chicago police at Homan Square, on the city's West Side. The implications are both brutally local and breathlessly global, as Borzutzky explains in an endnote: Chicago is a Latin American city that has reimported its extreme neoliberalism from Chile, policies that were first derived by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. This violence completes its cycle, begets greater violence. A searing indictment and an immediate, dangerous, and urgent work.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Inspired in part by the reported horrors of Homan Square, Chicago's notorious covert interrogation site, 2016's National Book Award winner for Poetry Borzutzky (The Performance of Becoming Human) continues his literary crusade against the socially destructive consequences of neoliberal capitalism, privatization, and police brutality. He envisions an Orwellian future in which the city's poor and underserved are exiled en masse to a lakeshore concentration camp, suffering torture, humiliation, and death, only to relive those abuses even after dying. Closer to a performance piece than a narrative poem, this collection presents 19 "scenes," sheets of litanic, declarative sentences, most in a collective first-person voice bearing feverish witness to state-sanctioned mayhem, ("The dead boys kept dying and the beach kept swallowing us and they beat us even though we did nothing"), others are plainly accusatory ("The Chicago liberal gives birth to the fascist"). VERDICT While Borzutzky drives home his timely message with relentless, often eloquent fervor, the repetitive imagery and structure of his polemic can be numbing over the long haul. Nevertheless, this work will appeal to readers who appreciate unabashedly activist poetry.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
