Splice by Anthony Borruso

Winner of the 2024 Louise Bogan Award, Anthony Borruso's Splice melds contemporary pop culture with enduring questions. This dynamic, sometimes darkly humorous montage of identity, chronic illness, and artistic homage examines the concept of selfhood. Navigating a disorienting experience of a chronic illness where thoughts "get stopped up / like an autumn gutter," the speaker shape-shifts into a multitude of voices that reconcile and congeal a fragmented existence. Splice ultimately explores our constant cycle of reinvention and imitation, an engine that both holds us back and moves us forward.

Anthony Borruso is the winner of the Louise Bogan Excellence in Poetry Award for his first collection, Splice; He is a former editor of The Southeast Review. He is a 2023 Best New Poet and was selected as a finalist for Beloit Poetry Journal's Adrienne Rich Award by Natasha Trethewey. His poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, THRUSH, Gulf Coast, CutBank, Frontier and elsewhere.