Marianne Boruch is the author of eleven poetry collections, including Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), The Anti-Grief (2019); Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing; Cadaver, Speak; and The Book of Hours, for which she won the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. She has also published three essay collections about poetry, including The Little Death of Self, as well as a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler. A professor emerita at Purdue University, Boruch continues to teach in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College.

Photograph by Will Dunlap.

The Small Hours

by Marianne Boruch

                                               —for EDB


At Scrabble, challenged once, looking
down the page, my old cousin
goes wry over the next word: uranium—
“a useless element.” Time to
throw out the dictionary!

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