Reading A.E. Stallings’ new book of poetry, Like (137 pages; FSG), my first impression was a furious delight at the way she invigorates the old forms and makes them sing. No one else I know can breathe such life into rhyme, can elevate the mundane to the mythic, the prosaic to the transcendent. The diction is often deliciously at odds with the form—contemporary slang set off against the myth of Pandora, for example: He’d said she was a punishment from Zeus, And that virginity made for a sour dowry Depreciating as soon as you drove it off the lot. The […]
Month: November 2018
Your Support Makes a Difference – Please Donate Today
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Dear Friends, As we close in on the end of the year, we have so much to be thankful for. It is a blessing to have the opportunity to produce good work and to be of service to our community. We hope that you feel ZYZZYVA is a meaningful part of your life, both as a reader and as someone who wants to see culture thrive, especially in these days of turmoil. So we ask: Will you help us continue our work? We do need your support. No gift is too small. Every dollar counts. Thanks to the generosity of […]
‘Where Things Stand’ by Cynthia White: ZYZZYVA No. 109, Spring Issue
by Cynthia White
Cynthia White is a poet in Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Nimrod, and Catamaran. You’ll find three of her poems in ZYZZYVA Issue No. 109. In celebration of the Thanksgiving season, we present her poem “Where Things Stand” in its entirety: I, in the doorway, reporting on the dawn, you with your coffee. A small bird is disturbing the quince, its name forgotten. You, lost to a book. The children stand on their own, distant, brilliant stars. Wild iris in a jar stand on the table, the table steadfast on cherry legs. Chairs stand empty, generous. We could be a couple in […]
How we can help those affected by the California fires
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Raging wildfires have devastated both Northern and Southern California over the last several weeks. The situation has been impossible to ignore here in the Bay Area, as smoke from the fires has led to tremendously poor air quality. We feel for those more immediately impacted by the fires –– the numerous missing and displaced –– and have assembled a list of places seeking donations. 7×7 has compiled a list of local causes we can contribute to, including Disaster Relief funds and donation collections. The San Francisco SPCA has set up a fundraiser, specifically to provide care and treatment for animals affected […]
Walking a Loose Rope: ‘Sidebend World’ by Charles Harper Webb
by Annah Omune Sidigu
Charles Harper Webb’s Sidebend World (78 pages; University of Pittsburgh Press) contains some genuinely lovely and worthwhile poems. At his best, Webb is funny and self-effacingly honest, delivering poems that are intimate and warm. Unfortunately, other poems in the book often border on careless—that is, they rely on weak associations or seem half-halfheartedly crafted. Worse, however, some poems contain stereotypical portrayals of others and humor that some will likely find offensive. First, let’s consider the positive aspects of Sidebend World. My favorite poem in the book, “Turtle Hunt,” is one that I could return to time and time again. The […]
In the Winter Issue
by ZYZZYVA
In this issue: Tales of the Uncanny “Shelter” by Kate Folk: the concrete vault in the basement of a rented house exerts a strange pull on the woman living above it. “Take the Water Prisoner” by Shawn Vestal: when the sins (and pains) of the father are visited upon the son. “The Canyon” by Jim Ruland: the struggle for sobriety leads Lindsay to a confrontation she couldn’t have imagined. “The Lake and the Onion” by David Drury: “There once was a lake who fell in love with an onion. This is merely what we 100 percent know.” Interview Michael Ondaatje […]
The Path Amid the Loblolly Pines: Q&A with Photographer Matthew Genitempo
by Michael Juliani
Matthew Genitempo’s forthcoming book of photographs, Jasper (96 pages; Twin Palms Publishers; available for pre-orders now), explores a region of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas where people live apart from the well-established norms of American life. Born and raised in the Houston area, now based in Marfa, Genitempo previously worked mostly in the Southwest; however, Jasper, his first book, represents a journey he made farther east while he was an MFA student at the Hartford Art School. The black-and-white photographs in this book capture a series of solitary men and the remote homes they’ve made in a lush and hardbound […]
Reckoning with Ever-Changing Reality: ‘John Woman’ by Walter Mosley
by M. M. Silva
In his newest book, John Woman (377 pages; Grove Atlantic), Walter Mosley reflects on truth versus perception as embodied in the life of a man who reinvents himself into the novel’s title character. Raised by a white mother with a habit of running away and a bedridden black father nearing death, Cornelius Jones experiences a childhood that is nothing if not difficult. As a boy he’s forced to pay his family’s bills by posing as his father (the first of more alter identities to come), assuming his job as a projectionist at a silent movie theatre. The pressure of covering […]
Emerging from the Fog: ‘America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience’
by Peyton Harvey
The first image we encounter in America, We Call Your Name: Poetry of Resistance and Resilience (203 pages; Sixteen Rivers Press) is that of Lady Liberty in the midst of a grey fog; it’s unclear as to whether she is receding or emerging. The editors have stated that the impetus for this anthology was a desire to help unify the country after the 2016 Presidential Election. The Trump Administration symbolizes the oppression that these poets are resisting; the collection acknowledges that the election woke up many people who had grown politically complacent. For this anthology, Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared […]
Flight Patterns: Q&A with ‘Amelia Earhart’ Author Larry Beckett
by Paul Wilner
Polymath poet Larry Beckett is flying high in Amelia Earhart (72 pages; Finishing Line Press), his latest addition to a cycle of epic tributes to the likes of P.T. Barnum, Paul Bunyan, and now Earhart, and with an upcoming volume on Wyatt Earp to round off a rubric on the “American Cycle.’’ The Portland writer is still best known for his collaborations with the late Tim Buckley, including the oft-covered classic “Song to the Siren,’’ but the long-ago death of his boyhood friend has not stopped him from cultivating his muse with fresh imaginings of seemingly unlikely subjects. Here, he […]