Year: 2021

‘Summerwater’ by Sarah Moss: Mortality, Regret, and a Rained-Out Vacation

by Rayna Carey

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Staying at a tourist campsite at a loch in Scotland, the different families of Sarah Moss’s Summerwater (203 pages; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) have to contend with a day of heavy summer rain. Even though relatively little action occurs for most of Moss’s humorous and poetic novel, Summerwater’s narrative is driven by its various characters’ contemplations during the rainstorm. From frustrated teenage siblings to a little girl taunting a stranger to an elderly couple silently wrestling with the past, the diverse characters reveal themselves through their internal stream-of-consciousness dialogue as they contemplate mortality, regret, and marriage, as well as their […]

Continue Reading

‘Beautiful Things: A Memoir’ by Hunter Biden: A Document of Addiction and Redemption

by Joseph Holsworth

Posted on by Zack Ravas

“I’ve smoked more cheddar popcorn than anybody on the face of the earth.” This line from Hunter Biden’s new memoir catches him at the lowest of lows. At this point in his decades-long addiction, he’s scrounging around for drugs, desperately searching between the seats of his car for anything resembling crack. His favorite snack food left flaky little pieces that to his addict’s eye looked just like rocks. Hunter Biden’s memoir, Beautiful Things: A Memoir (272 pages; Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), is written with the acumen and craft of a born writer. This book is not the typically pointless and […]

Continue Reading

‘Post-Mortem’ by Heather Altfeld: The Complexity of Loss

by Meryl Natchez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

There is a custom in the Jewish tradition called Kaddish, which includes saying aloud the names of the dead. The idea is that they live again for that brief moment when their name rings in the air. I thought of this while reading Heather Altfeld’s new book, Post-Mortem (100 pages; Orison Books), which details the complexity of loss we all know about but rarely speak of: the death of languages of indigenous peoples, of species, of the earth. Though the tone of the book is elegiac and it’s not light reading, the specificity and detail in these poems often make […]

Continue Reading

ZYZZYVA Staff Recommends April 2021: What to Read, Watch, & Listen To

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Owen Torrey, Intern: When the Nederlands Dans Theater 2 last toured through the city where I live, it was a late winter evening two years ago. I took the subway out from campus and arrived at an old theatre downtown, where the contemporary dance company presented several short works from their repertoire. At one point, dancers emerged on-stage to a doo-wop song, as small slips of paper fell from the auditorium’s high ceiling. A few collected in my lap, then piled around my shoes. Seeing my neighbor unfold hers and smile, I knelt to grab one. In tiny bold letters, […]

Continue Reading

National Poetry Month: Opening the Mail

by W. S. Di Piero

Posted on by Zack Ravas
ZYZZYVA Volume 35, #3, Winter 2019

The notices hit my inbox once a week, it seems,dusty phantasmal names sickly and unwanted.I don’t remember them, the boys from my high school,their Irish, Slavic, Italian names in the “subject” line,put there by Principle Father Rich, once one of us,we tough tender souls weathering snotty skies.The announcements come like rude enchantments, a sullen choirbeseeching with their newly minted news. They were there,as I was, but the names are husks, blowing through time,boys I never knew: Charlie McNally, Cosimo Picucci,Stosh Grzywinski, the Two-Streeters and corner boys,vets, mummers, contractors, bankers, teachers, priests,returning to their place among the infiniteunheard-from dead. The e-mails […]

Continue Reading

The Technology Issue: Letter from the Editor

by Laura Cogan

Posted on by Zack Ravas
ZYZZYVA Volume 37, #1, Spring 2021 (No. 120)

Dear Readers, At the beginning of George Dyson’s latest book, Analogia, he describes how, in 1716, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz hoped his calculus ratiocinator (an instrument that brilliantly anticipated digital computing) would “work out, by an infallible calculus, the doctrines most useful for life.” With this device, Leibniz imagined, “The human race will have a new kind of instrument which will increase the power of the mind much more than optical lenses strengthen the eyes.” I am struck by the analogy and how well it lends itself to piercing Leibniz’s optimism; for just as vision is not, in itself, perception, information […]

Continue Reading

‘Rabbit Island’ by Elvira Navarro: Masterful and Strange

by Lily Nilipour

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In “Strychnine,” the second story of Elvira Navarro’s collection, Rabbit Island (164 pages; Two Lines Press; translated by Christina MacSweeney), an unnamed narrator wanders an unnamed city while struggling to write a story—her story. The only thing she can decide on is a style: “She wants to enter this aura of serene iciness she has just imagined, which is also the tone she wants for her text.” But the narrator’s project becomes hindered by the growth of a strange protrusion from her right ear–a paw with toes that have small mouths. The paw hangs painfully from her earlobe, garnering sideways […]

Continue Reading

National Poetry Month: Invitation

by Al Young

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In memory of Papa Jo Jones & Philly Joe Jones There’ll be all the requisites & O how exquisite the presence of night blooming jazzmen & women, flowering in aurora borealis like all the rounded midnights & Moscow nights and New Delhi dawns you ever wanted to drop in on or sit in with or pencil into your calendar of unscheduled delights. There’ll be love in all its liquid power, rhythmic & brassy; mellifluous forms, flashing flesh & the slippery glittering skin of your teeth; enchantment, male & female; the orchid chords of hothouse scat as pop song, as darkness […]

Continue Reading

Q&A with Zhanna Slor: ‘At the End of the World, Turn Left’ and the Struggle with Identity

by Christine Sneed

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Zhanna Slor’s debut novel, At the End of the World, Turn Left (304 pages; Agora Books), is informed by a fine balance of comedy and drama. Set in Milwaukee in the late aughts, the novel’s two point-of-view characters, sisters Masha and Anna, alternately cast their ironic, sometimes bemused gazes on their family’s Russian Jewish immigrant circumstance, while also chafing strenuously at the limitations and the fear informing their parents’ and grandparents’ choices in America. Both sisters are progressive, adventurous, often funny young women who have no patience for their elders’ stern refusal to indulge their curiosity—especially Anna’s.  When the novel opens, […]

Continue Reading

In the Black, With Jessica

by Christian Kiefer

Posted on by Zack Ravas

The sound of a car gearing up the ashen road. Chuck thought at first that it had to be someone from Cal Fire or another crew but then the radio crackled and Bob told him it was a civilian. “Copy,” he said, and then, after releasing the button: “Fuck.”No part of him that was not

Subscribers only: to access this content, you must be a member of ZYZZYVA Studio. Membership is included with any subscription. Subscribe today, or if you are already a subscriber, log in to continue reading. (Read our FAQ for more details, and contact us if you have any trouble logging in.)

[…]

Continue Reading

‘Festival Days’ by Jo Ann Beard: Bright Illuminations

by Michelle Latiolais

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Consciousness. One of science’s big questions. What is consciousness? But we have been writing consciousness for thousands of years now, and one of America’s most miraculous writers has just given us a second collection of essays so brilliantly perceptual that the writing is—for all intents and purposes—neurological. The visual tapestry is so vivid, so rich, one forgets one is in the medium of language. Take almost any image or detail in a Jo Ann Beard piece and follow its pathways, its firings, its bright illuminations, its quieting into a kind of shade thrown across the entire essay—it is a map […]

Continue Reading

National Poetry Month: Twenty-Seven Objects of Explicit Wonder

by L.A. Johnson

Posted on by Zack Ravas

1. house with lawn gone yellow 2. no matter which direction, the wind 3. swimming pools and dreams of pools 4. coyotes that shriek like children 5. naked intruders 6. scent of honeysuckle through a sunroof 7. dish, broken, never thrown away 8. half-lidded sentences that ramble on 9. swimsuits drying on balconies 10. water even a seahorse would swim in 11. the clear circles a hawk makes in the air 12. reservoir, with a lover’s name 13. confessions heard over the ocean’s waves 14. two eggs cracked, each with two yokes 15. fingerprints on mirrors 16. fire danger warning: […]

Continue Reading