The Figure Going Imaginary

Marianne Boruch embarks on a journey of dark wonder in The Figure Going Imaginary. A gathering of journal entries, lyrical prose, poetry, and sketches from the author’s “Life Drawing” notebook, this hybrid collection recounts the unnerving and otherworldly experience of studying Gross Human Anatomy and life-drawing at Purdue University—an experience that also fueled her 2014 collection, Cadaver, Speak. In the studio, it’s the music of “charcoal to paper, a netherworld sound” and learning to bring human models alive on paper. In the cadaver lab, its “flashing knives and probes and forceps” that focus on another kind of beauty, the body as “map, a tracing, evidence of a life.” Guided by “the ancient task of learning to see,” this poet explores drawing, fate, and at the fragile center of it all, the mysteries of the human figure.