Handiwork

Handiwork probes the relationship between writing and torture—the ways poetry can wound us, and the ways it wrestles with language itself. Implicating the poet herself in the creative and destructive work of hands, Borsuk combines constraint-based writing with fragmented lyricism to question the limits of expression and the social and cultural role of the writer. Combining the impulse to document with the impulse to invent, these poems explore the terrain where family history becomes personal mythology, and where gaps open up that ask to be filled. Here, form's restriction paradoxically facilitates rune-like revelation through enclosures that “encompass a lovely absence.” They look to etymology and wordplay for ways to make sense where little sense is found, where words “so readily betray things they're meant / to represent.” In Handiwork's intertwined series of surreal fables, writings-through, and crystalline miniatures, text becomes a medium to be hewn and re-formed. When “the hand knows all about manipulation,” it is tasked with both acknowledging its wrongs and scattering the salts that will heal them. In the process of transformation, the poems in Handiwork suggest words' resilience despite the shocks to which they are subjected.

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of a chapbook, Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), and, with Brad Bouse, the hybrid digital/print book Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, forthcoming February 2012). Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in print and online. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT.