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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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The Small Hours

by Marianne Boruch
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                                               —for EDB


At Scrabble, challenged once, looking
down the page, my old cousin
goes wry over the next word: uranium—
“a useless element.” Time to
throw out the dictionary!

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