Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry revels in resistance

In 2016, Pittsburgh-born poet Daniel Borzutzky won the prestigious National Book Award for his poetry collection “The Performance of Becoming Human.”

When he accepted his award at a ceremony in New York, Mr. Borzutzky, who grew up in Squirrel Hill, attended Allderdice High School and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997 with a degree in philosophy, said: “Literature and poetry serve as a means of producing a social and historical memory.”

That could almost serve as a calling card for the kind of poetry that has made Mr. Borzutzky, who teaches at Wilbur Wright College of the City Colleges of Chicago, so acclaimed these days.

Earlier this year, the University of Pittsburgh Press published Mr. Borzutzky’s latest collection, “Lake Michigan.” Like his previous-collection, the poems in “Lake Michigan” continue Mr. Borzutzky’s inclination to explore issues of political, state and economic violence in Chicago and the violence between the U.S. and the restof the world.

“I don’t think there’s anything very difficult about reading or understanding the poems in ‘Lake Michigan,’” Mr. Borzutzky wrote in response to questions about his work. “They were written in a very direct language, and there is not much that is beneath the surface.”

The language in “Lake Michigan” is lean and lyrical, but it also resonates with an austere melancholy and realism that tries to be a witness to much of the state-sanctioned disorder of modern life in his adopted city.

“At a political level, many of the scenes I am presenting in ‘Lake Michigan’ are extreme in the physical violence, the economic violence and the rhetorical hatred directed at poor communities, immigrant communities of color in Chicago,” Mr. Borzutzky wrote.

“I would hope that people might see the ways in which the extreme has become commonplace. Liberals and conservatives have both gone out of their way to abandon poor communities at the expense of their constituents with money. Similarly, extreme over-policing and rhetorical violence towards these same communities has become the norm.”

On Thursday evening at the Ace Hotel in East Liberty, Mr. Borzutzky will read excerpts from “Lake Michigan” and be interviewed by Dawn Lundy Martin of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

“People go to [poetry readings] for many reasons,” Mr. Borzutzky said. “I personally want to be moved and changed by it. It’s an honor when readers and listeners have that experience.”

Daniel Borzutzky will read at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Ace Hotel, 120 S. Whitfield St. The event is free.