Borruso exploits ekphrasis as a way to generate a conversation with a work of art, like the above referenced Salvador Dal\u00ed painting, or artistic technique, such as voice-over or the dolly shot to guide or direct our readerly attention. Poems such as \u201cScorsese Dreamsong\u201d achieve both effects, shifting from film analysis to autobiography in the terse rhythms patterned by ornamental couplets. Hardly any of Splice\u2019s poems take up more than a single page, and though each of them across the book\u2019s four sections (and one \u201cPost-credits Scene\u201d) flex their author\u2019s erudition, casting an unabashedly worldly gaze, Borruso never strays from the interiority that sculpts his Splice: the body and its insecurities and uncertainties, as when, in \u201cResonance Imaging,\u201d his speaker awaits diagnosis while traveling, through sound wave\u2019s association, to all the capitals he can remember off the top of his head\u2014\u201cthe spin,\u201d he writes, \u201cof my mind\u2019s \/ vinyl.\u201d \u201cYes, geography will save me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The body\u2014and all its moving and moveable parts\u2014is on the author\u2019s mind; so, too, are the deficiencies and failures that so often make us slip, sometimes productively, into other registers or frequencies. Cohering the speakers\u2019 diatribes on plot vs. style, performative activism and the poet as a lifestyle brand, gentrification, new age folk philosophy, the \u201cact of love,\u201d and the \u201cart of feigning knowledge\u201d are the inner workings and breakdowns of the body: deviated septums, inner ear conditions, migraines, macular degeneration, the careful work of kidneys, and craniotomy speckle the collection with sensory goo or glue. Again and again, Borruso mends any mind\/body problem through his adroit implementation of splice, most poignantly in the moments of rehearsal and playback of the open-skull surgical calisthenics his own body endured, emblematized by the severed skull on the book\u2019s cover. In \u201cSelf-Portrait With an Open Skull,\u201d Borruso\u2019s speaker begins by cataloging the details of sensation and the room in which he\u2019s been placed, \u201cface-down,\u201d prior to the procedure. Though it only takes two stanzas for the gaze of cinema to rush in and infect memory with its technological mediation:<\/p>\n
\nGodly cinematographer,
get that dolly shot
in the subway, show a rat
trekking a slice of pizza down
the tracks. This is where
one goes when the lights go
out.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nSplice\u2019s poems can be characterized by turns\u2014and sometimes all at once\u2014as vulnerable, witty, satiric, and inquisitive. With cutting vulnerability and brutal clarity welded by third-wall implosions, Borruso achieves the spacey, bedazzled effect of a late-night Netflix tryst, in which any static picture is prone to moving (and talking) if you allow yourself to linger, or forget that you\u2019ve been looking. If there\u2019s an artist statement smuggled in Borruso\u2019s mosaic of clips cut up, grafted, and rearranged, it\u2019s in \u201cOde to R. Budd Dwyer,\u201d another requiem that speaks, also, to the poet\u2019s preferred methods of confession and composition:<\/p>\n
\nTo have two mouths, one for singing
and one for screaming bloody murder\u2014<\/p>\nthis is what the poet strives for, to speak
from the temples. Still, I promise no spectacle,<\/p>\nI will not make of me a puzzle, a humpty-
dumpty-put-back-the-pieces affair.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nIn an age of AI generated legibility and one-click solutions escorted by algorithmic advertising, Borruso\u2019s auspicious debut is a clarion call for complexity, nuance, ambiguity, and the plenitude that arises from fragmentation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Borruso exploits ekphrasis as a way to generate a conversation with a work of art, like the above…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":49537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1037,37595,35617,37596,2677,1022,37598,37599,37594,392,10929,171,3607,1020,975,37600,37597,37601,1148,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-49536","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-art-books","10":"tag-art-critic","11":"tag-art-reviews","12":"tag-artists","13":"tag-books","14":"tag-brooklyn-art","15":"tag-brooklyn-culture","16":"tag-contemporary-art","17":"tag-culture","18":"tag-dance","19":"tag-entertainment","20":"tag-fiction","21":"tag-film","22":"tag-music","23":"tag-new-york-art-scene","24":"tag-phong-bui","25":"tag-poetry","26":"tag-theater","27":"tag-united-states","28":"tag-unitedstates","29":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114819394815211513","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}