Poets

Daniel Borzutzky grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of Chilean heritage. He has published a collection of fiction, Arbitrary Tales (2005), a poetry chapbook, Failure in the Imagination (2007), and two full-length volumes of poetry, The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007), and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011).

Borzutzky’s work is often humorous and satirizes political figures and contemporary culture. Amy Groshek, reviewing The Ecstasy of Capitulation for CutBank, commented: “His syntactic strategies mirror closely those of absurdist poets, but he cleverly injects thin strings of narrative, using historical events and speakers, and the tone of these speakers, to give his poems coherence. His specialty is a manic, obsessive jargon peppered with legalisms, bureaucratic and corporate newspeak, and a positively twenty-first century fanaticism.”

Borzutzky has translated a number of works by Chilean writers, including the poet Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008) and the fiction of Juan Emas, published in a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 2007.

Borzutzky has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Koç University in Istanbul, and Wilbur Wright College of the City Colleges of Chicago. In December 2014, he was a featured writer for Harriet.