Splice - by Anthony Borruso (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 Louise Bogan Award, Anthony Borruso's Splice melds contemporary pop culture with enduring questions. This dynamic, sometimes darkly humorous montage of identity, chronic illness, and artistic homage examines the concept of selfhood. Navigating a disorienting experience of a chronic illness where thoughts "get stopped up / like an autumn gutter," the speaker shape-shifts into a multitude of voices that reconcile and congeal a fragmented existence. Splice ultimately explores our constant cycle of reinvention and imitation, an engine that both holds us back and moves us forward.

Review Quotes

I admire the witty juxtapositions of philosophical artistic conversations, allusions to cinema and cinematic moments, the absurdity of celebrity culture, and ultimately the inescapability of our mortality. While through art the assumption is that one can become immortal, the poems in Splice ask us, "really?" With incredible verve and a large dose of self-deprecating humor, the poet skillfully weaves essential questions about our existence as we look to the legacies preserved for us for the answers. We find, in these poems, sometimes behind the prop door there's a brick wall . . . and sometimes, joy.

-Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets

A great poet is like a great neighbor, like the guy who looks over your fence while you're doing yard work to ask you how things are going, and forty-five minutes later you realize you've just had one of the best conversations of your life. You two might talk about something as operatic as the State Senator who blew his brains out on air or as mundane as your wife's ex-boyfriend's food allergies, as Anthony Borruso does here, but actually nothing is mundane in a Borruso poem because of the levels of rhetoric he deploys, the concatenation of devices from cinéma verité reportage to the charming cascade of images that so often wraps things up. So put down that rake, reader, and pick up this book: you've got a great afternoon ahead of you.

-David Kirby, author of The Winter Dance Party

Splice's speaker-musical, intellectual, an aesthete and a patient-is a "me in morphological crisis," a cultural consumer being consumed by the art that they graft on, in. "Don't the commons make you weep?" Borruso asks. "What belongs to anyone seems increasingly slippery." And though the self slips and slides amongst the viscera of its influences, the mind in Borruso's tough, singular poems does insist on one solace, ironically: art, its connectivity, its power to make sense of the world.

-Katie Berta, author of Retribution Forthcoming

Splice revs and idles at the intersection of film, popular culture, and autobiographical narrative. In Borruso's capable hands Steve Buscemi's wonky face becomes a springboard for an ode to imperfect humans. Tucked between ekphrastics and propulsive, humorous lyrics are poems that ask if art and knowledge itself will continue to parrot its OG makers, even as the poet strives to make it new: "Am I a virus / or a minimalist drawing of a person scrutinizing his creator / Damning his use of voice-over caesura artifice." In the tradition of Q-Tip, Scorsese, and the montage, Anthony Borruso's Splice is deeply committed to the remix. And man, can he sing!

-Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer

In this stunning debut, Anthony Borruso splices his "lyric I" with the selves of various artists from the past and present: Alfred Hitchcock, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Herman Melville, Pete Davidson, and others. The book also grapples with the catastrophe of illness, or as one speaker describes it: "the me / in morphological crisis." This thrilling collection exhibits the vitality of a mind focused by the proximity of death and impelled forward by curiosity and appreciation.

-Christopher Brean Murray, author of Black Observatory