“I am vehemently protective of my native city—its rollicking history and gritty glories are legion. But it is also sweltering, blade-edged and murderous, with brown people squarely in its gunsights. Borzutzky’s surreal and terrifying lakeside dreamscape—sparked by the real-world specter of the city’s infamous ‘blacksite’ interrogation warehouse—is deftly crafted and chilling in its proximity to the real.” —Patricia Smith

"A searing indictment and an immediate, dangerous, and urgent work." —Booklist
 

"Borzutzky's streamlined and unequivocally defiant follow-up to 2016's National Book Award-winning The Performance of Becoming Human unfolds across the streets of Chicago and along the shores of Lake Michigan, where he situates a fictionalized version of the Chicago PD's once-secret interrogation sites. Composed in long, proselike lines, this work explicitly places itself in the tradition of protest poetry. Police brutality is a major theme, both as occasion for protest and enacted. . . . Authorities repeatedly attempt to normalize their brutality, claiming that this is "only war," that it is, "only the beginning of war." Borzutzky engages with a history specific to Chicago, but the beach becomes a symbolic border zone where people suffer at the hands of capitalist power and, crucially, search for the means to fight back." —Publisher's Weekly