<DIV><p>"Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention."?<I>The Washington Post</I></p><p>"[H]er patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."?<I>Poetry</I> magazine</p><p>Endearingly strange, unsentimental, and uniquely structured, in true Rilkean fashion <I>The Book of Hours</I> questions the meaning and significance of everything from the flaws of human interaction to perfect posture. Unrelenting honesty and exacting description are coupled with the trials of a dying mother, saint shadows, birds, and "shit drying to chalk."</p><p><I>My mother's body to wires, to tubes<BR>and their liquid, days she turned toward me<BR>or away, winter but so much sun<BR>from car to door. I followed it past nurses<BR><BR>at their station talking movies, who's good<BR>in one and not the other. Gown tied<BR>at the back and neck, she slept beside<BR>a window. I wedged my chair there, reading,<BR><BR>looking up, reading,?who knows what<BR>I read?her legs bruised, thin, arms battered<BR>by the doctor's needle. Her face. Can I<BR>say this plainly now? There was light<BR><BR>as she grew less. She drifted to it.<BR>I'm not hungry, not religious, I'm in a spot,<BR>she told me one afternoon then<BR>closed her eyes to that radiance again.</I></p><p><B>Marianne Boruch</B> grew up in Chicago and earned a masters degree from the University of Massachusetts. She teaches at Purdue University and at Warren Wilson College. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.</p></DIV>