Sing by the Burying Ground: Essays

Meditations on life, literature, and curiosity amid the shadows

In her fourth essay collection, award-winning author Marianne Boruch explores the possibilities of hope even in darkness. Through poetry, the silence of Trappist monks, the pandemic moment, the Wright brothers’ quirky stab at flight, treasured knickknacks, and more, this book celebrates the weird, the mundane, the overlooked, and the promise of a future. Though each essay is distinct, foraging fresh ways into Louise Glück, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Langston Hughes, and more, they are all connected through the thread of Emily Dickinson’s comment that her fate was to ＂sing, as a Boy does by the Burying Ground . . .＂ Even in times filled with horror, we find beauty. Maybe we can sing in the blackest of nights.

Thoughtful and expressive, this collection provides solace and humor for readers in a world where both are often in short supply.

MARIANNE BORUCH is the award-winning author of numerous poetry and essay collections, including Bestiary Dark, The Anti-Grief, The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays toward Poetry, and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler. Among her honors are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim and two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency, a Fulbright Senior Scholar appointment, and a Fulbright Visiting Professorship.