Is the world finite? Through place and time and the great expanse of Australia, Marianne Boruch ponders this, aided not just by wallabies and platypus, kangaroos and wombats, but by a cheeky Archangel who wanders in and out of her poems. The pertinent wisdom of an Indigenous Elder is here too, along with the continuing presence of Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and historian who in 77 CE posed the question Boruch considers. Written following Boruch's Fulbright in Australia, and on the heels of the devastating fires that began after her departure, Bestiary Darkis filled with strange and sweet details, beauty, and impending doom-the drought, fires, and floods that have grown unspeakable in scale. These poems face the ancient, unsettling relationship of humans and the natural world-the looming effect we've wrought on wildlife-and what solace and repair our learning even a little might mean.
"Boruch refuses to see more than there is in things-but her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."-Poetry
"Boruch places the exceptional within the mundane and the intimate within the universal, and above all highlights the present moment without ever losing sight of a broader context in which now is just one moment among many." -Publishers Weekly
"She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice."-The Washington Post
"Boruch displays a quietly gymnastic intellect in the examinations of art, the body, and the human condition."-American Poets
"Her approach isn't meant to fix or crystallize her ideas in any hard and fast light, but rather to present the music of her thinking... Boruch brings in personal memory and philosophical speculation, infusing much of this writing with slightly skewed skepticism and rueful uncertainty about one's ability to be absolute about anything."-Trinity University Press
