The Book

by Amaranth Borsuk

What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? Borsuk bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.

About the Artist

Amaranth Borsuk is a poet, scholar, and book artist whose work encompasses print and digital media, performance and installation. Her books of poetry include Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016); Between Page and Screen (SpringGun Press, 2016), a book of augmented-reality poems created with Brad Bouse; As We Know (Subito, 2014), an erasure collaboration with Andy Fitch; and Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012). Her intermedia project Abra (1913 Press, 2016), created with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher, received an NEA-sponsored Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts and was issued in 2015 as a limited edition hand-made book and free iPad / iPhone app. This spring, The MIT Press will publish her volume The Book, an examination of the technology we think we know intimately that considers it as object, content, idea, and interface. Amaranth is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where she recently became Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics.