"A hunger so elaborate"

I've been in love with Marianne Boruch's work since the summer I read her Poems: New and Selected during my daughter's swimming lessons. I fell in love with her style and her acute detail of past and present moments. Even her first memoir, The Glimpse Traveler, doesn't steer from her quality of vision.

I'm currently finishing Boruch's newest book of poems, The Book of Hours, which is unlike any book of hers I've read before. (I should note that Boruch is a poet who doesn't repeat herself, who pushes herself further with each new project.) The book is divided into eight sections. The title of every poem is the first line, and every poem is composed of unrhyming quatrains. Enjoy the one below.


Like the silkworm. Is it


Like the silkworm. Is it
spit the spider
leaves behind? Loose
tangle of squares

and circles so moth
and fly go stupid
to pass through or rest
on a thread. Not yet,

either one, though wind
billows the doorway.
She does a little repair,
down, sideways.

A hunger so elaborate
is casual now. Nothing
to it but the rising
and the falling.


Marianne Boruch
from The Book of Hours
Copper Canyon Press