The Figure Going Imaginary: Life Drawing, Poetry, the Cadaver Lab; A Year in Pieces

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.

Marianne Boruch is a poet and essayist whose eleven books of poetry include Cadaver, Speak, and The Book of Hours, both from Copper Canyon Press. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, andPoetry. Among her honors are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. She founded the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Purdue University and remains on faculty at the low-residency graduate Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.