Cadaver, Speak

Born out of a gross anatomy course, the title poem of Boruch’s eighth collection (after The Book of Hours) is a 30-part sequence in the voice of the 99-year-old woman whose body was dissected in the class: “The body—before they opened me—the darkest dark// must live in there. Where color is wasted./ Because I hear them look:/ bright green of gallbladder, shocked yellow fat.” Boruch’s broad attention, intelligence, and imagination manage questions of death, physicality, and the transactions of knowledge both within the lab and across history. Every moment is charged with multiple meanings—narrative, scientific, epistemological, ontological—as the deceased speaker references her own life and death, comments on dissection techniques, explores anatomical formalities, and ponders the clinical and social negotiations of the medical students (“The way one of them,// I’m sorry to me/ when her knife flashes wrong.”). Equally concerned with mortality and meaning, the collection’s other poems are contained lyric meditations anchored in the real and specific. Boruch tracks the mind through King Tut’s tomb, natural disasters, body hair, artworks, and beyond, always as invested in knowledge as in its limits: “No human is ancient enough to grow wings. No human/ remembers enough for the long antennae to know/ what eternal is, meaning brief, meaning/ only this one time.” (Apr.)