This Thursday at 7 p.m., author (and ZYZZYVA contributor) Jonathon Keats will be at City Lights to discuss his newest book, You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future (Oxford University Press). Called by Douglas Coupland a “wonderfully written and highly necessary book about one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic outliers,” the book takes Fuller’s life and personal myth as a basis for applying his world-changing ideas in the present. The following is an excerpt from Keats’s book. Late one evening in the winter of 1927, Buckminster Fuller set out to kill himself in frigid Lake Michigan. […]
Month: April 2016
‘On the Road’ by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch: ZYZZYVA No. 106, Spring
by editor
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch is the author of the poetry collections “Rockclimbing in Silk” (Seren), “Not in These Shoes” (Picador), and “Banjo” (Picador). In 2014 she held a residency at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth, and she is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship. She lives in Wales.
Two of her poems appear in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer Issue (No. 106), including “On the Road.” An examination of Madame Tusaud and her long-lasting craft of wax figures, “On the Road” isn’t so much intrigued by the Tusaud’s waxworks as it is by how they ever came about. “To make the dead appear living, the living dead//without quite meaning to, is a skill I cannot/ yet take in …,” says the poem’s speaker. What follows is the poem in its entirety.
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The Extremities of Human Experience: Q&A with ‘I Met Someone’ Author Bruce Wagner
by Zack Ravas
The fact that the dust jacket for Bruce Wagner’s latest novel, I Met Someone (Blue Rider Press; 384 pages), carries blurbs from award-winning author Sherman Alexie as well as acclaimed filmmaker Steven Soderbergh reveals how adroitly Wagner has been able to navigate both the literary scene and the world of Hollywood. Over the last several years, Wagner has been at work on what he calls the Inferno series, starting with 2012’s Dead Stars, a sprawling and densely packed novel about life on the fringes of stardom, which Tom Bissell dubbed “the Ulysses of TMZ culture.” In 2015, David Cronenberg directed […]