Handiwork

Handiwork probes the relationship between writing and torture��he ways poetry can wound us, and the ways it wrestles with language itself. Implicating the poet herself in the creative and destructive work of hands, Borsuk combines constraint-based writing with fragmented lyricism to question the limits of expression and the social and cultural role of the writer. Combining the impulse to document with the impulse to invent, these poems explore the terrain where family history becomes personal mythology, and where gaps open up that ask to be filled. Here, form's restriction paradoxically facilitates rune-like revelation through enclosures that ��ncompass a lovely absence.��They look to etymology and wordplay for ways to make sense where little sense is found, where words ��o readily betray things they're meant / to represent.��In Handiwork's intertwined series of surreal fables, writings-through, and crystalline miniatures, text becomes a medium to be hewn and re-formed. When ��he hand knows all about manipulation,��it is tasked with both acknowledging its wrongs and scattering the salts that will heal them. In the process of transformation, the poems in Handiwork suggest words' resilience despite the shocks to which they are subjected.