Marianne Boruch is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Figure Going Imaginary (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), Bestiary Dark, 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. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Photograph by Will Dunlap.

The Small Hours

by Marianne Boruch

                                               —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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