The Figure Going Imaginary

Life Drawing, Poetry, The Cadaver Lab; A Year in Pieces

By: Marianne Boruch

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Paperback | 4 March 2025

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Paperback
136 Pages

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15.2 x 22.8 x 1.91

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Exploring drawing, fate, and the mysterious human body, Boruch embarks on a journey of dark wonder in The Figure Going Imaginary.

Marianne Boruch embarks on a journey of dark wonder in The Figure Going Imaginary. A gathering of journal entries, lyrical prose, poetry, and sketches from the author's "Life Drawing" notebook, this hybrid collection recounts the unnerving and otherworldly experience of studying Gross Human Anatomy and life-drawing at Purdue University--an experience that also fueled her 2014 collection, Cadaver, Speak. In the studio, it's the music of "charcoal to paper, a netherworld sound" and learning to bring human models alive on paper. In the cadaver lab, its "flashing knives and probes and forceps" that focus on another kind of beauty, the body as "map, a tracing, evidence of a life." Guided by "the ancient task of learning to see," this poet explores drawing, fate, and at the fragile center of it all, the mysteries of the human figure.

Industry Reviews

"Boruch refuses to see more than there is in things-but her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."-Poetry

"Boruch places the exceptional within the mundane and the intimate within the universal, and above all highlights the present moment without ever losing sight of a broader context in which now is just one moment among many." -Publishers Weekly

"She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice."-Robert Pinsky, Book World, The Washington Post

"Boruch displays a quietly gymnastic intellect in the examinations of art, the body, and the human condition."-American Poets

"Her approach isn't meant to fix or crystallize her ideas in any hard and fast light, but rather to present the music of her thinking... Boruch brings in personal memory and philosophical speculation, infusing much of this writing with slightly skewed skepticism and rueful uncertainty about one's ability to be absolute about anything."-Trinity University Press

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