The Brooklyn Rail

At the turn of the twentieth century, when the motion picture industry was in its nascent stages, editors began to refer to the cutting and joining of their individual film as a “splice,” a word that had until then been used in rope-making (sixteenth century), shipbuilding (seventeenth century), surgery (eighteenth century), and genetics (nineteenth century), a chain that suggests the word’s own intrinsic desires to apply meaning through process and material recombination. Anthony Borruso’s debut poetry collection takes its name and, moreover, its organizing principle, from the artisan technique, paying homage to cinematic and poetic forebearers with an inventiveness and a generosity that doesn’t want to obscure each cut but rather aims to deepen them. To render the art object, it is necessary to tend to the hole. Splice (Trio House Press, 2025), selected for the Louise Bogan Award in 2024 by Trio House Press, mobilizes a frenetic polyphony, embodying both the giddiness and seduction of the metaphysical poets and the montage—crafted by Borruso’s nimble use of enjambment, parataxis, and caesura—of a twenty-first century scroll, inhabiting the death drive of the former and the simultaneous horizons of the latter.

Empowered by apostrophe and the invitation for collective experience, many of Splice’s poems read like odes and addresses to others, collapsing celebrity (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi) and suicide (Evelyn McHale, R. Budd Dwyer) to consider the casualty of all representation once the “I” is aestheticized and objectified. Indeed, among the subjects Borruso intends to cut open and investigate is subjectivity itself, a stable and singular lyric “I” that is, throughout his collection, both parsed and passed around. “My lyric ‘I,’” he writes in “Under the Water or Whistling,” “is oil slick and merrily, merrily, confessing / supposed sins, a smiling Steamboat Willie, / with violent urges and whistling resourcefulness.” Borruso’s tongue-in-cheek acknowledgments serve as bait that implicates not just the author but also their readers. A page later, the aptly named “On Symbiosis” begins by claiming “I know how badly you want me / to be in this poem. How, by candlelight / and tapestry, you prod your way / from solitude—a finger pressed / to the page like a stethoscope”—a clinical sequence that underscores the violence blurred in the oscillation between seeing and knowing. The bargain of watching, Borruso’s speaker seems to assert, is that the reader-viewer must not look away:

That’s why I offer a truce,

a last inch of grace; I wager
my body as the male praying
mantis does, head first, swooning
towards transcendence or a jug

of gasoline ready to feed itself to fire.

Such indelible images perform as car crash or any star’s catastrophe as seen from the security of our mobile screens—passing cars or roving cursors. Though Borruso’s speakers don’t just aim to entertain; they critique the systems and behaviors that facilitate the normalization of moral vacuity, in which the mentality of the mob dictates the cultural consensus. Consider the collection’s prefatory poem, “Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano,” which operates as both an invitation and an admonition:

For love is honed in

onanism and hopelessness. The pianist
cracks his fingers with anticipation
then pounds a ruinous instrument.
This is the world we live in; you can look

away or stroke an I like a shadow
fondling its lack.

Borruso exploits ekphrasis as a way to generate a conversation with a work of art, like the above referenced Salvador Dalí painting, or artistic technique, such as voice-over or the dolly shot to guide or direct our readerly attention. Poems such as “Scorsese Dreamsong” achieve both effects, shifting from film analysis to autobiography in the terse rhythms patterned by ornamental couplets. Hardly any of Splice’s poems take up more than a single page, and though each of them across the book’s four sections (and one “Post-credits Scene”) flex their author’s erudition, casting an unabashedly worldly gaze, Borruso never strays from the interiority that sculpts his Splice: the body and its insecurities and uncertainties, as when, in “Resonance Imaging,” his speaker awaits diagnosis while traveling, through sound wave’s association, to all the capitals he can remember off the top of his head—“the spin,” he writes, “of my mind’s / vinyl.” “Yes, geography will save me.”

The body—and all its moving and moveable parts—is on the author’s mind; so, too, are the deficiencies and failures that so often make us slip, sometimes productively, into other registers or frequencies. Cohering the speakers’ diatribes on plot vs. style, performative activism and the poet as a lifestyle brand, gentrification, new age folk philosophy, the “act of love,” and the “art of feigning knowledge” are the inner workings and breakdowns of the body: deviated septums, inner ear conditions, migraines, macular degeneration, the careful work of kidneys, and craniotomy speckle the collection with sensory goo or glue. Again and again, Borruso mends any mind/body problem through his adroit implementation of splice, most poignantly in the moments of rehearsal and playback of the open-skull surgical calisthenics his own body endured, emblematized by the severed skull on the book’s cover. In “Self-Portrait With an Open Skull,” Borruso’s speaker begins by cataloging the details of sensation and the room in which he’s been placed, “face-down,” prior to the procedure. Though it only takes two stanzas for the gaze of cinema to rush in and infect memory with its technological mediation:

Godly cinematographer,
get that dolly shot
in the subway, show a rat
trekking a slice of pizza down
the tracks. This is where
one goes when the lights go
out.

Splice’s poems can be characterized by turns—and sometimes all at once—as vulnerable, witty, satiric, and inquisitive. With cutting vulnerability and brutal clarity welded by third-wall implosions, Borruso achieves the spacey, bedazzled effect of a late-night Netflix tryst, in which any static picture is prone to moving (and talking) if you allow yourself to linger, or forget that you’ve been looking. If there’s an artist statement smuggled in Borruso’s mosaic of clips cut up, grafted, and rearranged, it’s in “Ode to R. Budd Dwyer,” another requiem that speaks, also, to the poet’s preferred methods of confession and composition:

To have two mouths, one for singing
and one for screaming bloody murder—

this is what the poet strives for, to speak
from the temples. Still, I promise no spectacle,

I will not make of me a puzzle, a humpty-
dumpty-put-back-the-pieces affair.

In an age of AI generated legibility and one-click solutions escorted by algorithmic advertising, Borruso’s auspicious debut is a clarion call for complexity, nuance, ambiguity, and the plenitude that arises from fragmentation.