In the Blue Pharmacy by Marianne Boruch
Ellen Bryant Voigt recommends
In the Blue Pharmacy, essays by Marianne Boruch: “The same capacious mind on display in Boruch’s selected poems is everywhere available here, as is her characteristic meditative structure, one that circles its subjects and their implications without any sort of didactic overreaching. In ‘The Rage to Reorder,’ the last piece in this new prose collection, she investigates a convincing alternative to the obsession with change over a poetic career, as in the ‘breakthrough’ narrative applied to Lowell and others, offering in its stead the increased ‘range of motion’ sought in muscular rehabilitation. Her exemplars are Elizabeth Bishop and the nest-building impulse of the English sparrow, but she might have used her own work as well (although such self-reference would no doubt be unthinkable to her), both her sly and nimble poems and these brilliant, evocative essays, a graceful record of a lifetime of deep, open, perceptive thinking about poetry and poems.” (Trinity)
