From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.
Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection The Performance of Becoming Human, Daniel Borzutzky is a Chilean-American writer and translator living in Chicago. His other poetry books are Lake Michigan, In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, The Book of Interfering Bodies, The Ecstasy of Capitulation, and the chapbook Failure in the Imagination. He has published one collection of fiction, Arbitrary Tales. His books of translation include Song for his Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita and Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenun.
Daniel's selections From the Stacks are:
Testimony (The United States 1885-1915: Recitative) by Charles Reznikoff
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader by Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Jan Heller Levi
Notebook of a Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire
Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems by Ernesto Cardenal
New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña by Cecilia Vicuña, translated by Rosa Alcalá
Spain, Let This Cup Pass From Me by César Vallejo
Mommy Must Be A Mountain of Feathers by Kim Hyesoon
Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik
The Origin of the World by Lewis Warsh
In the Mecca by Gwendolyn Brooks