Lake Michigan

Review by Maureen Alsop

National Book Award winner, Daniel Borzutzky’s Lake Michigan, is a book which stands up and will not sit down. The collection, structured in two Acts, declares itself as drama, and unfolds a map of living dread within the United States. The collection begins with “Lake Michigan, Scene 0. ”  The first line of this poem sets the stage for the intensity with which the collection reels: “There are 7 of us in front of the mayor’s house asking questions about the boy they shot 22 times.”  The emphasis on the shooting repeats, as do the commercial references within the landscape:  Disney Store, Apple Store, Banana Republic, Brooks Brothers… These omnipresent corporations represent cultural consumerism and act as both a backdrop and distraction to dire events. Consequently, Borzutzky’s observations increase the disturbance and undertone of the outcry for justice. An eeriness pervades. Borzutzky deftly states “it’s not always possible to feel something as violent as hatred…” “we exist in a historical continuum   our comrades in the 16^th century were also not told why they were imprisoned or tarred or killed.” Upon this landscape he further observes:

“The men in uniform take the garbage away but they have a hard time distinguishing garbage from the people so they scoop it all up and carry us into the next morning.”

Borzutzky’s poems are substantive and shuddersome. The essay-like poems are monumental in the expanse and depth of their delivery. Through anaphora and dirge, his creation of spaciousness within the poems offer well variegated lines:

“I walk on the lake and hear voices

I hear voices in the sand and wind

I hear guilt and shame in the waves

I have my body when others are missing

I have my hands when others are severed

I hear the children of Chicago singing   We live in the blankest of times”

Borzutzky’s apocalyptic messages are implacable. His litany enters the body, the city, the lake, the sky… nothing is immune to the infiltration.

“No salt in my body   I say   no heat in my blood

The sand is dying slowly  …

have staked my burdens to the wrong nation…

I fight for my burdens   scream the bodies on the beach

I know the blankness of my burdens is a battle for love and country

I know the blankness of my burdens is a coda to the death of the city

I don’t know why I can’t see the moon anymore

I can’t see the stars or the sky anymore

I don’t even bother to look up”

The despondence, the shock, the rage, the grief are palpable. It is as if Borzutzky’s pleas to an unknowable universe are an unbearable echo to the unanswerable question “why?”  His lack of punctuation (primarily the period) at the end stop of each line suggest the fluidity of the unending blooded within our culture which creates an emptiness and void.

In Lake Michigan Borzutzky unleashes, in Two Acts and 19 scenes, the inner war zone that is the United States. He documents a war which entails dehumanization. A persistent anxiety rocks against a goliath of political forces. We are bound to a society of oppression. The turmoil lives not externally, but within us. Here anguish is archived in for each reader to question the doom.

Lake Michigan
Daniel Borzutzky
University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 978-0822965220