The Book of Interfering Bodies

Author: Daniel Borzutzky

Publisher: Nightboat Books (2011)

Beginning with an epigraph from the 9/11 Commission Report, The Book of Interfering Bodies re-imagines the poet as bureaucrat, barbaric writer, and terrorist. In this book, poems that invoke the role of the writer in society alternate with apocalyptic prose pieces that recall Borges' "Library of Babel." In the process, Borzutzky creates a 21st century response to our most enduing twentieth century writers, from Beckett to Lispector.

"This book is a fetid, fascinating torrent. Unflinching if shellshocked, Daniel Borzutzky is recording our suicide as it happens. In this accounting, minds and bodies have become fragments to be toyed with, digested and erased. Here and there are moments of genuine tenderness, humor, even lyricism, but this is one degraded body, onto which all misfortunes are inscribed."

–Linh Dinh