Amaranth Borsuk
Amaranth Borsuk’s work focuses on textual materiality from the surface of the page to the surface of language.
Borsuk is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where she also serves as Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics. She and her colleagues run a lively series of events and readings throughout the year that bring innovative writers and artists to campus. In 2019, they hosted the bi-annual &Now Festival of Innovative Writing with the theme “Points of Convergence.” From 2013-2017, she was part of the cross-disciplinary research group Affect and Audience in the Digital Age, which hosted symposia and speakers on the Seattle and Bothell campuses of UW through the generous support of the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Before coming to Bothell, she served as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies and Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she taught workshops and courses related to poetry’s changing media forms from modernism to the present.
She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where her work focused on the use of writing technologies by modern and contemporary poets to change their relationship to the page and their construction of authorship. While at USC, she co-founded The Loudest Voice (click here for the series’ latest incarnation) with Bryan Hurt. Together with Hurt and Genevieve Kaplan, in 2010 she co-edited The Loudest Voice: Volume 1 (Figueroa Press), an anthology of work by readers from the first four years of the series. She also co-founded the Gold Line Press chapbook series with Kaplan, which publishes chapbooks of fiction and poetry in alternating years through an annual contest.
Poetry by Amaranth Borsuk
You’re nothing but a bad pomme,
grainy fruit (not pome), a globose
berry from which we’ve garnered
garnets, grange, gram, and grenadine.
Your task is to gamble on limited
light and space and face the
meadow, alkali mallow, let light
lick your basal rosette and bloom
bottle thistle through your bearded
creeper.