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Anne Boyer
Anne Boyer
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Anne Boyer (born 1973) is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of The Romance of Happy Workers (2008),[1] The 2000s (2009),[2] My Common Heart (2011),[3] Garments Against Women (2015),[4] The Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018),[5] and The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (2019).[6]

Key Information

In 2016, she was a featured blogger at the Poetry Foundation, where she wrote an ongoing series of posts about her diagnosis and treatment for a highly aggressive form of breast cancer, as well as the lives and near deaths of poets.[7] Her essays about illness have appeared in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. Boyer teaches at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.[8]

Her poetry, essays, and books have been translated into numerous languages including Icelandic, Spanish, Chinese, French, Hungarian, Persian, and Swedish. With Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig, she has translated the work of 20th century Venezuelan poets Victor Valera Mora, Miguel James, and Miyo Vestrini.

In 2020, Boyer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her book The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care.[9]

Life and career

[edit]

Anne Boyer was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1973 and grew up in Salina, Kansas where she was educated in public schools.[10] She earned a BA in English literature from Kansas State University in 1996 and an MFA in poetry from Wichita State University in 1997.[11] She has taught at the University of St Andrews since 2023,[12] having previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute (2007-2023) and Drake University (2005-2007). In 2018-2019 she was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge,[13] and in 2023 she was the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.[14] Her diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer has become the subject of her current work, examining the intersection of social class and medical care.[15]

Boyer is the winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and her book Garments Against Women won the 2016 Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Award in poetry. She was also named "The Best Writer in Kansas City" by The Pitch.[16] In 2018, she also won the Whiting Award in Nonfiction/Poetry.[17]

In March 2020, Boyer was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.[18]

She resigned from her role as the poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine in November 2023, in protest at the newspaper's coverage of the Gaza war. In her resignation letter, she wrote "the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone" and that she "won’t write about poetry amid the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.".[19]

Critical reception

[edit]

Boyer's 2015 book Garments Against Women spent six months at the top of the Small Press Distribution's best seller list in poetry.[20] The New York Times called it "a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of life and literature itself."[21]

Chris Stroffolino at The Rumpus described it as "widening the boundaries of poetry and memoir."[22]

Garments Against Women was described by Publishers Weekly as a book that "faces the material and philosophical problems of writing—and by extension, living—in the contemporary world. Boyer attempts to abandon literature in the same moments that she forms it, turning to sources as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the acts of sewing and garment production, and a book on happiness that she finds in a thrift store. Her book, then, becomes filled with other books, imagined and resisted."[23]

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care tied for winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.[24]

Works

[edit]
  • Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse. Effing Press, 2006.
  • Selected Dreams with a note on Phrenology. Dusie, 2007.
  • The Romance of Happy Workers. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 2008. ISBN 9781566892148
  • Art is War. Lawrence, Kansas: Mitzvah Chaps, 2008.
  • The 2000s: A history of the future in advance of itself. 2009.
  • My Common Heart. Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011
  • A Form of Sabotage. 2013.
  • Garments Against Women. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2015. ISBN 9781934103593
  • A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Brooklyn, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018. ISBN 9781937027926
  • Money City Sick as Fuck. London: Materials, 2019.[25]
  • The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. ISBN 9780374279349

References

[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia
from Grokipedia
Anne Boyer (born 1973) is an American and essayist whose work examines the intersections of , , and personal experience, often through experimental forms that critique and institutional power. Raised in , she holds a BA from and an MFA from , and has taught writing at institutions including the . Boyer's breakthrough nonfiction work, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, , Art, Time, Dreams, , Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (2019), details her diagnosis and treatment for while analyzing systemic failures in healthcare and data-driven medicine. The book received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for , recognizing its blend of memoir and cultural critique. Her poetry collections, such as Garments Against Women (2015), which won the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Award in , explore labor, , and resistance through fragmented, conceptual structures. Other accolades include the inaugural 2018 Cy Twombly Award for from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the 2018 Whiting Award, and the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction. In November 2023, Boyer resigned as poetry editor of , publicly denouncing the publication's coverage of the Israel-Hamas war as complicit in what she termed a , highlighting tensions between literary editing and institutional media positions. This act underscored her longstanding commitment to in her writing and public life, though it drew mixed responses amid broader debates over journalistic neutrality.

Early Life and Education

Upbringing in Kansas

Anne Boyer was born in , in 1973. She grew up in , a small city in the central part of the state. Her father, a country lawyer, maintained a strong personal interest in literature despite his professional occupation, stocking shelves with poetry and novels; he read aloud to her from works such as and . Family dynamics included contrasting views on intellectual pursuits, as one grandmother held the belief that reading induced "brain sickness." Boyer's early environment reflected rural Midwestern life, involving activities like consuming lukewarm orange soda during harvest season and exposure to local cultural events, such as attending a performance by and in nearby . During her formative years, Boyer engaged with countercultural elements, including late-night visits to The Outhouse, music venue situated in a wheat field outside Salina, and early encounters with figures like prior to Nirvana's mainstream success. She was educated in public schools and libraries, which shaped her initial literary and intellectual development.

Academic Training

Boyer earned a degree in English literature from in 1996. She subsequently obtained a degree with distinction in from in 1997. These degrees represent her primary formal academic training in literature and poetry, institutions both located in where she was raised. No further advanced degrees, such as a PhD, are documented in her educational background.

Literary Career

Initial Publications and Style Development

Boyer began her publishing career with a series of chapbooks, including Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse, Art is War, and The 2000s, which laid the groundwork for her experimental approach to poetry. These early works featured fragmented, interrogative forms that interrogated personal and collective experiences, often blending lyricism with critique of everyday labor and ideology. Her first full-length collection, The Romance of Happy Workers, was published by Coffee House Press on April 1, 2008. The book comprises 90 pages of that traverse themes of comradeship, conquest, and domesticity through mock-Russian lyric sequences and Keatsian odes, portraying a world of ", conquistadors, comrades, and housewives" in a swaggering, ironic tone. This collection marked an initial stylistic pivot toward politicized , influenced by communist ideals and a rejection of romantic individualism, emphasizing collective struggle over personal epiphany. Subsequent early works, such as My Common Heart (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011), further developed this style by incorporating prose poems that dramatized the intersections of motherhood, writing, and economic precarity. Boyer's evolving approach widened poetry's boundaries, shifting from traditional verse toward essay-like structures that embedded political dissent within domestic narratives, prioritizing noncompliance and dialectical tension over conventional resolution. This phase established her as a poet who used literature to probe excluded social realities, setting the stage for later hybrid forms blending memoir and critique.

Major Works and Themes

Anne Boyer's major works encompass experimental poetry collections and prose explorations of personal and systemic crises. Her debut poetry volume, The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House Press, 2006), features lyric sequences blending mock-Russian forms with references to , conquistadors, comrades, and housewives, emphasizing playful yet angry metamorphoses amid labor and historical conquests. Subsequent collections include My Common Heart (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011) and Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press, 2015), the latter critiquing literature's historical uses against women through motifs of , thrift shopping, , chemical spills, , child-rearing, and relational constructs in an era of "indentured moods." In prose, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) compiles essays interrogating poetry, death, love, and impossible questions, modeling refusal against the difficulties of poverty, silence, and fate's excuses for pleasure or pain. Her memoir The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (, 2019), which earned the 2020 , recounts her diagnosis and treatment, dissecting medical institutions, digital illness narratives, and stages like the cancer pavilion and deathwatch. Boyer's oeuvre recurrently probes , constraints, labor's romanticization, and precarity's intersections with personal life. Her poetry expands genre boundaries to challenge literature's complicity in , as in Garments Against Women's assault on , legacy, and amid feminist discontent. works extend this to the politics of care and illness, rejecting individualistic cancer tropes for systemic critiques of exhaustion, data-driven medicine, and vulnerability's communal dimensions. Themes of refusal underpin her refusal of easy resolutions, preserving the "messy difficulty" of bodily and economic harms.

Awards and Honors

In 2020, Boyer received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her memoir The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, which chronicles her experience with triple-negative breast cancer and critiques aspects of medical and cultural responses to the disease. That same year, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction by Yale University, recognizing exceptional achievement in English-language nonfiction writing with a grant of $165,000. Earlier honors include the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, an inaugural $35,000 grant supporting innovative poetic work, selected for her contributions to experimental poetry. Also in 2018, Boyer won a Whiting Award in both and categories, each providing $50,000 to emerging writers demonstrating significant talent and promise. In 2015, her poetry collection Garments Against Women earned the Firecracker Award for Poetry from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, acknowledging outstanding contributions by independent literary publishers. Additionally, she held the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in Poetry and Drama at the for 2018–2019, a visiting position funding creative research and writing.

Political Engagement

Ideological Influences and Communist Leanings

Anne Boyer has publicly identified as a communist, emphasizing a non-elitist form of the ideology that prioritizes and human cooperation over capitalist structures. In a 2019 , she stated, "I am definitely a communist," arguing that "the should be held in common" and rejecting as "a ." She has critiqued for fostering "suspicious & narrow" souls and linked planetary survival to transcending it, asserting that "two choices are always a " in electoral politics. Her ideological influences draw heavily from Marxist thought, though she distances from obligatory intellectualism, noting that "you don’t have to be a Marxist intellectual; you don’t have to be an intellectual at all" to embrace socialist principles. Boyer's writing frequently engages Marxist concepts, such as ; in a 2020 essay, she referenced Karl Marx's observation that people "make our history under conditions of our choosing," contrasting this with a utopian vision of as a era for unfettered philosophical and communal pursuits. This reflects a broader commitment to collectivism, where she prioritizes "We" over isolated "I" in poetic and political expression, viewing individual narratives as insufficient without communal context. Boyer's poetry and essays often explore communist themes through experimental lenses, as seen in her 2004 collection The Romance of Happy Workers, which layers historical and imaginative engagements with proletarian optimism and critique, blending serious ideological inquiry with playful disruption. Works like these demonstrate influences from Marxist-feminist , incorporating critiques of labor, , and capital reproduction, while avoiding dogmatic . Her approach aligns with a practical, anti-extinction that seeks to dismantle scarcity-driven systems, evident in essays invoking communist pamphlet aesthetics and anti-capitalist activism.

Public Statements and Activism

Boyer has publicly identified as a communist, stating in a 2019 that she believes "the world should be for the people and we should have the in our hands." Her emphasizes anti-capitalist themes, including critiques of labor exploitation and calls for communal resource distribution, often expressed through essays and online posts rather than formal organizational affiliation. No records indicate membership in communist parties or direct involvement in labor unions or political organizations. In public conversations, Boyer has linked poetry to political , arguing in a 2015 that must confront systemic inequalities and that personal expression can serve as resistance against institutional norms. She has described writing as a form of noncompliance with capitalist structures, incorporating explicit calls for in her Substack posts, such as envisioning a future where aligns with communist ideals of shared abundance. These statements frame artistic practice as inherently activist, though they prioritize theoretical critique over documented participation in demonstrations or campaigns. Boyer issued prominent public statements on the Israel-Gaza conflict, including her November 16, 2023, resignation from the poetry editorship of The New York Times Magazine, where she condemned the outlet's coverage as enabling "warmongering lies" and "ghoulish euphemisms" in support of what she termed the "Israeli state's US-backed war against the people of Gaza." Earlier, on October 19, 2023, she signed an open letter from the art community urging cultural organizations to oppose complicity in the violence, demanding an immediate ceasefire and end to occupation. These actions positioned her as a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy and media narratives, though they drew scrutiny for aligning with pro-Palestinian advocacy amid broader debates on journalistic neutrality.

Controversies and Public Disputes

New York Times Resignation

In November 2023, Anne Boyer resigned as poetry editor of , a role she had held since 2021, where she selected and introduced poems published weekly in the Sunday edition. Her resignation, announced via a public letter posted on her newsletter on November 16, 2023, protested the newspaper's coverage of Israel's military response to the October 7, 2023, attacks on . Boyer described the conflict as "the Israeli state's US-backed war against the people of Gaza," which she characterized not as a war but as a "genocide" enabled by institutions including the Times. She accused the newspaper of disseminating "warmongering lies" that dehumanized Palestinians and justified violence, claiming its reporting prioritized Israeli casualties while marginalizing Palestinian suffering and ignored broader geopolitical motives such as "oil interests and arms deals." Boyer argued that her position at the Times implicated her in this coverage, stating, "To be an editor at The New York Times is to be part of an institution that enables genocide," and emphasized that poetry's role in bearing witness to human suffering conflicted with the paper's alleged complicity. The letter invoked poetic and ethical imperatives, quoting to assert that silence amid atrocity equates to participation, and positioned her exit as a refusal to "police language" or sanitize violence through institutional platforms. It followed a pattern of staff dissent at the Times, including the November 3, 2023, resignation of magazine writer over her signing of an criticizing the paper's Israel-Gaza reporting. Boyer's departure contributed to the end of the Times Magazine's nine-year poetry column, as the publication discontinued the feature shortly thereafter. Public response included widespread mockery of Boyer's framing, with critics highlighting perceived hyperbolic rhetoric, such as her claim that the yielded "profit" only for arms dealers and oil interests, amid evidence of Hamas's role in initiating hostilities and using civilian infrastructure. Supporters, including some literary outlets, praised the letter as a bold ethical stand, though assessments of the Times' coverage varied, with internal critiques from staff alleging editorial pressure to align with pro-Israel narratives, contrasted by external analyses questioning the paper's balance in casualty reporting and historical context.

Criticisms of Ideological Bias in Writing

Critics have accused Anne Boyer of allowing her ideological commitments to distort her interpretations of philosophical and historical texts, prioritizing polemical dismissal over nuanced analysis. In a 2014 review of Louis Althusser's On the Reproduction of Capitalism published in The New Inquiry, Boyer portrayed Althusser's structuralist as detached from practical class struggle and inherently anti-political, likening it to a "Marxism for those who prefer their class struggle as Philosophy." She further connected his theoretical anti-humanism to his personal act of strangling his wife in 1980, implying a causal link between his ideas and violence. This approach drew rebuke from Rafael Khachaturian in Dissent magazine, who argued that Boyer's essay misrepresents Althusser by neglecting his major works like For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1968), reducing his critique of humanism and ideology to a straw man that ignores its relevance to ongoing debates on state power and subjectivity under capitalism. Khachaturian contended that Boyer's linkage of Althusser's philosophy to his wife's murder constitutes an ad hominem fallacy, oversimplifying complex intellectual evolution and personal mental health struggles while echoing earlier critics like E.P. Thompson without substantive engagement. He viewed this as indicative of a broader tendency in Boyer's nonfiction writing to favor activist-oriented Marxism over rigorous theoretical confrontation, potentially biasing her toward reductive narratives that align with her anti-structuralist preferences. Such critiques extend to perceptions of Boyer's poetry and essays, where explicit communist themes—evident in collections like Garments Against Women (2015), which interrogates labor, gender, and capital through fragmented, anti-lyric forms—have been faulted for subordinating aesthetic universality to ideological messaging. Reviewers outside avant-garde leftist circles have noted that her refusal of conventional poetic structures and emphasis on systemic critique can render her work didactic, framing personal experiences through a lens that attributes disparate phenomena, such as illness in The Undying (2019), predominantly to capitalist exploitation rather than multifactorial causes. This has led to claims that her writing exhibits confirmation bias, selectively amplifying anti-capitalist causal narratives while downplaying empirical counterevidence on, for instance, medical advancements independent of ideology.

Critical Reception

Praise for Innovation and Vulnerability

Critics have praised Anne Boyer's work for its innovative fusion of poetic experimentation and personal exposure, particularly in her 2019 memoir The Undying, which chronicles her experience with diagnosed in 2015. The book received the 2020 , with jurors highlighting its "elegant and unforgettable narrative" that intertwines individual suffering with broader critiques of medical capitalism. Reviewers noted Boyer's departure from conventional illness narratives by incorporating fragmented , theoretical digressions, and data-driven analysis, reorienting the breast cancer memoir toward an "unruly event" of bodily and systemic disruption rather than linear recovery tales. Boyer's vulnerability emerges in her unflinching depiction of physical and emotional tolls, such as chemotherapy-induced exhaustion and the fear of mortality at age 41, which she renders without sentimental resolution, emphasizing instead the raw contingencies of care and . This approach drew acclaim for transforming private into a indictment, as in her refusal of "" optimism in favor of exposing medicine's profit motives and data exhaust. In poetry collections like Garments Against Women (2015), similar innovation appears through conceptual constraints and anti-capitalist motifs, earning the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Award for Poetry in 2016 for its bold reconfiguration of domestic and economic languages into disjointed, probing forms. Such elements underscore Boyer's stylistic risks, where vulnerability serves not as but as a methodological tool for interrogating power structures, prompting critics to laud her for advancing experimental and that prioritize intellectual rigor over .

Critiques of Political Preachiness and Accessibility

Critics have observed that Boyer's integration of explicit anti-capitalist and feminist ideologies into her poetry and essays can render portions of her work didactic, prioritizing political messaging over aesthetic subtlety or emotional resonance. For instance, her neo-Marxist commitments, as noted in analyses of contemporary resistance , position her texts within a where ideological critique risks overshadowing poetic form, potentially alienating readers seeking unbound by agenda. This perception arises particularly in works like Garments Against Women (2015), where terse, politically charged prose explores themes of labor and gender oppression, leading some to view the ideological framework as bordering on prescriptive rather than exploratory. Boyer's experimental style, drawing from conceptual poetry, further compounds critiques of , with fragmented structures, unconventional , and dense referentiality often described as opaque or exhausting for non-specialist audiences. A of Garments Against Women characterized her pieces as "dense, sometimes exhausting works" that demand laborious unpacking, despite their laconic tone providing a measure of emotional distance. Broader commentary on post-2000 laments a shift toward such obscure, conceptually driven modes—exemplified by Boyer's oeuvre—away from personal, narrative-based writing that prioritizes reader engagement over intellectual abstraction. In The Undying (2019), innovative elements like elided letters and mosaic-like essays amplify this difficulty, transforming personal into a challenging hybrid that resists straightforward comprehension. These formal choices, while innovative, reflect a niche within avant-garde circles, where literary institutions' left-leaning biases may undervalue critiques of inaccessibility in favor of ideological alignment.

Works

Poetry Collections

Anne Boyer's debut full-length poetry collection, The Romance of Happy Workers, was published by Coffee House Press in 2008. Her second collection, My Common Heart, appeared in 2011 from Spooky Girlfriend Press. The work draws on communal themes amid the . Boyer's third major collection, Garments Against Women, was issued by Ahsahta Press in 2015 and awarded the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry the following year. Earlier chapbooks include Selected Dreams with a Note on and Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse.

Essays and Nonfiction

Anne Boyer's nonfiction output encompasses essays and hybrid forms that interrogate personal experience, illness, poetry, and societal structures, often blending memoir, critique, and philosophical inquiry. Her works in this genre include A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018), a collection of interrogative essays and ephemera exploring themes such as poetry, death, love, and existential impossibilities, published by Ugly Duckling Presse. This volume draws from a decade of her writing, presenting fragmented reflections on disappointment and fate rather than prescriptive narratives. Her most prominent nonfiction book, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (2019, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a memoir chronicling Boyer's diagnosis with aggressive triple-negative breast cancer in 2014 as a single mother. The narrative critiques the commodification of illness under capitalism, the inadequacies of medical institutions, and the cultural narratives surrounding cancer, while weaving in historical and literary references to mortality and care. It received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, with the board praising it as "an elegant and unforgettable narrative about the brutality of illness and the capitalism of cancer care in America." Boyer also won the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction for the work in 2020. Beyond these books, Boyer has contributed essays to literary journals and platforms, including pieces on poetics, labor, and health in outlets like n+1 and The Believer, though these remain uncollected in dedicated volumes. Her nonfiction often resists conventional memoir forms, favoring experimental structures that prioritize conceptual disruption over linear storytelling.

References

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