About Russell
Poet of the Upper Peninsula and Detroit, of Lake Superior and the Italian patisserie.
Russell Thorburn is the author of five books of poems. His writing draws on his own experiences while imagining fictional characters and personal heroes — Whitman on the beach of Lake Superior, Federico Fellini at the Old Marquette Inn, Sam Spade at an Italian patisserie in Birmingham, Michigan.
Somewhere We’ll Leave the World, published by Wayne State University Press, opened that imaginative geography. In Let It Be Told in a Single Breath and And the Heart Will Not Quicken, published by Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, he picked up where he had left off — with recurring characters and a younger self in dislocations of time and space. His forthcoming third Cornerstone volume, All That My Body Can Bear, completes the trilogy.
He has received numerous grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and he was the Upper Peninsula’s first poet laureate.
The Memory of Henry Zender
Henry Zender, Russell’s great-grandfather, kept a tavern across the street from a historical Lutheran church on the Detroit River. He had three daughters and a son. In the one photograph that survives him, he stands uncomfortably before a hooded photographer who represents, in the manner of the early twentieth century, something like death.
his eyes look away
every time when the photographer
tells him to count to three and not blink,
but there’s a freighter on the Detroit River.
Herons stalk the riverbank,
like diplomats of a lost country,
and he daydreams about his wife
when she’s washing up in the morning.
The poem belongs to the third Cornerstone book. The name belongs to this practice. Henry Zender is the patron of the work because what he could not do in front of a camera — hold still, look back, name the freighter — is precisely what we are trying to do on the page.
Places of the work
Russell’s poems move between the Upper Peninsula and Detroit, with detours to Marquette’s old hotel in 1980, to Birmingham, Michigan, to Idaho cabins without heat, to Federico Fellini’s hotel room, to the beach of Lake Superior where Whitman, Ginsberg, and Burroughs swim and Brueghel paints.
The work he keeps writing is faithful to two places at once — the home ground of the U.P. and the remembered streets of southeast Michigan — and to the figures, living and gone, who arrive there to be heard.
Honors & appointments
- National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
- First Poet Laureate, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
- Numerous additional grants and residencies