Lake Michigan

In Lake Michigan, National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky writes in direct response to a history of police abuse targeted at African Americans and carried out at Homan Square, a secret interrogation facility on the west side of Chicago.

From the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for poetry

Lake Michigan, a series of 19 lyric poems, imagines a prison camp located on the beaches of a Chicago that is privatized, racially segregated, and overrun by a brutal police force. Thinking about the ways in which economic policy, racism, and militarized policing combine to shape the city, Lake Michigan's poems continue exploring the themes from Borzutzky's Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. But while the influences in this book (Cesaire, Vallejo, Neruda) are international, the focus here is local as the book takes a hard look at neoliberal urbanism in the historic city of Chicago.

Finalist for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize

From the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for poetry

Lake Michigan, a series of 19 lyric poems, imagines a prison camp located on the beaches of a Chicago that is privatized, racially segregated, and overrun by a brutal police force. Thinking about the ways in which economic policy, racism, and militarized policing combine to shape the city, Lake Michigan's poems continue exploring the themes from Borzutzky's Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. But while the influences in this book (C saire, Vallejo, Neruda) are international, the focus here is local as the book takes a hard look at neoliberal urbanism in the historic city of Chicago. Named a 2018 Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library.