RaveNew YorkerThe ugly music of our own moment resonates, stark and dissonant, in the very first line of Daniel Borzutzky’s latest poetry collection ... This mixture of visceral horror and authoritative detachment—not conventionally lyrical—feels disturbingly familiar, epitomizing the tone of what Borzutzky calls \'the blankest of times.\' ... Sentence structures replicate almost mechanically across long, prose-like lines, evoking the roteness of modern evil: systemic murder is subsumed into a daily churn of business as usual, reduced to anecdotes—memes, even—that may go viral but soon recede into the feed ... Borzutzky follows in a long tradition of challenging the notion that art should ennoble the experience of oppression ... Borzutzky situates a single, close-to-home catastrophe—the attack on his own congregation—within a constellation of American atrocity: abuses against migrants at the border, the habitual slaying of Black people by cops, the covid-19 pandemic that has disproportionately devastated marginalized communities. Instead of preserving current events in stone monuments, Borzutzky handles history as liquid, the past a wave forever crashing into the present.
Ariana Reines
PositiveThe New Yorker...audacious ... The book is a psychedelic epic about climate change and forever war; capitalism and surveillance; gun violence and police brutality; fascism and genocide; diaspora, mental illness, gender, and the occult. These subjects are inseparable from the signs and symbols by which, in our media-glutted moment, they are relentlessly articulated ... In A Sand Book, capitalism’s parasitic effect on discourse mirrors its ransacking of the environment; Reines ties cultural and spiritual desiccation to literal desertification ... In A Sand Book, the threat of annihilation is not just speculative but historical. Reines reckons with patriarchy’s assaults and imperialism’s appetites, as well as more localized atrocities ... The journey A Sand Book narrates is not a hero’s triumph, then, but something messier, less readily legible ... Reines navigates existential calamity as she does literature and language—like a sieve or a singing bowl ... A Sand Book shows her consciousness at its most expansive and integrated to date. These poems understand nothing so well as their own inevitable incompleteness—that no composition could contain everything, that every history is partial.
