A Roadkill Emu Comes Back from the Dead to Speak

Event Details

This talk grew from the astonishing experience poet Marianne Boruch had as she observed the wildlife of Australia as a Fulbright Research Scholar in 2019. Then, as she says, came the raging fires, the dire threat to so many creatures–koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, and emus already endangered from climate change at that very bottom of the world. Because Indiana is Australia and Australia is Indiana–meaning any part of the world shares the impending doom of any other part–together we have only a narrowing window-of-hope to save the planet, and ourselves. Marianne will read from her newly published book of poems, BESTIARY DARK, offer commentary, and invite discussion about poetry, our beloved and imperiled wildlife, and the deepening alarm of climate change here and around the world.

Marianne Boruch (MFA, University of Massachusetts) has taught writing workshops and craft courses in poetry for 32 years at Purdue University where she established the MFA Program in Creative Writing before going rogue and emeritus in 2018. She’s given readings widely in the US and beyond. Her work has appeared in the The New Yorker, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry and elsewhere. In addition to eleven collections of poems, she’s written prose that includes three books of essays abut poetry, and a memoir about hitchhiking in the early 70s (Indiana University Press, 2011). Among her honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, The Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards, and artist residencies at the American Academy in Rome and at two national parks, Denali and Isle Royale.