Amaranth Borsuk Publishes Two New Books of Poems

This spring sees the publication of two new books of poems by IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk. Pomegranate Eater was just released by Kore, a feminist press based in Tucson whose mission is "to publish and promote excellent works of stunning literary value and innovation by a diversity of women, including those traditionally underrepresented in the cultural mainstream and to educate young people about the power of voice and effecting change through literary activism." The book's "radiant host" lives where fecundity meets decay, where the orderly Victorian garden explodes in wild tendrils. In rich and densely-layered confections, Borsuk's poems invite us to devour self after self as the text’s shifting speaker builds and rebuilds an identity in language. Through prose poems interrogating the self in the guise of various fruit, epistles obliquely addressing a shadow lover, and dense lexical tapestries whose words seem to point only away from meaning and toward one another, Pomegranate Eater lets language speak, directing our gaze at its shimmering surfaces.

Borsuk will launch the book in Seattle at a signing with press-mate Sarah Mangold (whose Giraffes of Devotion was also published this spring) at Open Books on Saturday May 21 from 4-6pm.

Borsuk's other new book, Abra (1913 Press), is part of her ongoing collaboration Abra: A Living Text. A companion to the artist's book and free iOS app Borsuk published this fall, the foil-stamped paperback book offers its own unique reading experience of a long collaborative poem meditating on excess and mutation written with Kate Durbin. Like in the app, the text mutates on the page, suggesting a continuum between the printed book and digital tablet as animated reading interfaces. The poem’s stanzas meld one into the next, each recycling language from the preceding and modeling uncontrolled activity. Illustrations by visual artist Zach Kleyn grow and mutate on facing pages, a flip-book contortion that eventually reaches across the gutter to meld with the text. Borsuk launched the book in New York last week with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher. In a reading at Printed Matter Bookshop, the trio read from each iteration of the book and invited a number of other writers to present works inspired by and in dialogue with Abra, or created through the Abra app. The book is now available through San Diego's 1913 Press.

In addition to these new publications, Borsuk's collaboration with Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen, has just come back into print in a new edition from SpringGun Press.