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Marianne Boruch is the author of eleven poetry collections, including Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), The Anti-Grief (2019); Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing; Cadaver, Speak; and The Book of Hours, for which she won the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. She has also published three essay collections about poetry, including The Little Death of Self, as well as a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler. A professor emerita at Purdue University, Boruch continues to teach in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College.

Photograph by Will Dunlap.

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Four Poems

by Marianne Boruch
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I’ll Give You a Body
That Won’t Die

I’ll give you a body that won’t die,
god whispered in an ear, 643 AD, some
year like that. In a cave or a hut nowhere—
comma—middle of. And isn’t that deep down

anyplace? said god. A body that wouldn’t or
couldn’t. I mean, said god, you’ll die, of course.
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