Description: Poetry. HANDIWORK is in itself a work of craftsmanship, piecing together fragments while at the same time producing anew. Borsuk summons the tradition of Hebrew gematria to investigate and engage with language's slipperiness, and, as she explains, to provide "a sense of hope within constraint: the fruitful possibility of language." It also wrestles with and probes into "where family history becomes personal mythology, and where gaps open up that ask to be filled." The reader explores, in HANDIWORK, both the creative and destructive urges imminent in expression, as "what wounds is easily unwound."
Brief description: Amaranth Borsuk is the author of a chapbook, Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), and, with Brad Bouse, the hybrid digital/print artist's book Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, forthcoming). She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, and she is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT.