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ZYZZYVA Events
May 4, 2019Bay Area Book Festival
Location: Outdoor Fair, Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Park, Berkeley
Description: Come visit our booth featuring new and select back issues, hoodies, T-shirts, and totes. More info here: https://bit.ly/2v0bedC
May 9, 2019The Art Issue Celebration, San Francisco
Location: 7 p.m., City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco
Description: Featuring contributors Cate Lycurgus, Dean Rader, Jordan Cantor, Rusty Morrison, and Mira Rosenthal; hosted by Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. Free. More info here: https://bit.ly/2D6VZ7k
May 16, 2019The Art Issue Celebration, East Bay
Location: 6 p.m., Traywick Contemporary, 895 Colusa Ave, Berkeley
Description: Featuring contributors Heather Altfeld, Dan Alter, Toni Martin, Troy Jollimore, and Diana Guerrero-Macia. Emceed by Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. Free.
May 30, 2019In Conversation with Kathleen Alcott
Location: 7:30 p.m., The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco
Description: Alcott, author of the novels "Infinite Home" and "The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets," discusses her new book, "America Was Hard to Find" (Ecco), with Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. https://bit.ly/2IEY2Ty
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Author Archives: Second Shoppe Manager
‘Midnight, Talking about our Exes’ by Ada Limón: National Poetry Month
April represents National Poetry Month, intended as a way to spread awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. To celebrate, each week we will be taking a look back at ZYZZYVA’s recent and distant past to share some choice selections. For our third installment, we present “Midnight, Talking about our Exes” by Ada Limón from ZYZZYVA No. 94: The sun is still down and maybe even downer. Two owls, one white and one large-eared, dive into a nothingness that is a field, night-beast in the swoop-down, (the way we all have to make a living). Let’s be owls tonight, stay …Continue reading
‘Bright Stain’ by Francesca Bell: A Universe of Pain
Francesca Bell’s first book of poetry, Bright Stain (104 pages; Red Hen Press), reflects a dark universe in which sexual pleasure and pain are intricately linked. There are bright moments of delight, but few without an aftertaste. This debut collection is impressive for it’s distinctive voice and pungent imagery. Many of the poems deal with the jolts of adolescent sexual awakening, its heat and surprise and terror, and Bell is not afraid of putting both her vulnerability and hunger on display: By fourteen, I had transformed, body gone from tight-fisted to extravagant… No blouse would button over my excess. Nothing …Continue reading
‘My Madness is My Love Toward Mankind’ by Devon Walker-Figueroa: National Poetry Month
April represents National Poetry Month, intended as a way to spread awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. To celebrate, each weeek we will be taking a look back at ZYZZYVA’s recent and distant past to share some choice selections. For our second installment, we present “My Madness is My Love Toward Mankind” by Devon Walker-Figueroa from ZYZZYVA No. 112: For Nijinsky People are mistakes and I do not want to commit any. Opinions are in me. God is in me. More than anything, immobility is an invented thing. I have two ends and they are both on fire. Because …Continue reading
‘Little Boy’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Life as an Endless Novel
“And so do I return to the monologue of my life seen as an endless novel.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Little Boy (179 pages; Doubleday) is aptly self-identified as “unapologetically unclassifiable” on its jacket copy, and the poet Billy Collins called it a “torrent of consciousness” in his own review. Both descriptions are fitting for the short but powerful work by the now 100-year-old Ferlinghetti. Little Boy begins as a rather fast-paced novel, narrated in the third person, based on Ferlinghetti’s childhood. It tells the story of Little Boy, who was raised by his Aunt Emily, later was moved to an orphanage, and …Continue reading
‘The Altruists’ by Andrew Ridker: The Good Life
Andrew Ridker’s first novel, The Altruists (308 pages; Viking), follows a middle-class family, the Alters, as they struggle with the impact of unexpected wealth. Ridker is merciless in skewering each member of the family, and nearly every aspect of modern culture, from campus identity politics and the queer dating scene to poorly planned foreign aid missions. The novel’s wickedly dark sense of humor combines with a complex plot to create a compelling debut. The story centers around Arthur Alter, a rapidly aging, untenured professor at a middling St. Louis university who is close to defaulting on the mortgage for his …Continue reading
‘Astray’ by John Sibley Williams: National Poetry Month
April represents National Poetry Month, intended as a way to spread awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. To celebrate, each week we will be taking a look back at ZYZZYVA’s recent and distant past to share some choice selections. To begin the month, we present John Sibley Williams’ poem “Astray” from ZYZZYVA No. 112:A neighborhood gone missing. Only the torn electrical tape that held it together remains of the cul-de-sac where most of us learned to drive in circles. No bedroom windows left for songbirds to strike each morning or streets made of tin foil or walls of …Continue reading
Q&A with Andrew Ridker: The Absurdity of the Facts of Things
It’s hard not to see Andrew Ridker’s acerbic, cerebral first novel, The Altruists (319 pages; Viking)—which has attracted attention from NPR and The Times, among others—as an answer to the question of how to think about, let alone write about, a major strain of American life in 2019. The plot centers around a family at once archetypal and painfully real: Arthur, a pedantic, regret-filled professor who finds tenure elusive; his psychotherapist wife, Francine, whose premature death from breast cancer was worsened by Arthur’s cheating on her in the terminal stages of her illness; their daughter, Maggie, a sanctimonious, kleptomaniac tutor; …Continue reading
ZYZZYVA Recommends March 2019: What to Read, Watch, & Listen to
Before we head off to Portland for AWP ’19, we thought we would share what ZYZZYVA recommends this month—a roundup of the works we’ve been reading, watching, and listening to: Katie O’Neill, Intern: The abundance of streaming services available online have largely killed any urge I have to watch live TV. Outdated advertisement breaks combined with the difficulty of committing to a set time make it more effort than it’s generally worth to catch a program as it airs. But, every Wednesday night at 9pm I can be found in front of my TV tuned in to SYFY to catch …Continue reading
‘Fire Season’ by Patrick Coleman: Intergenerational Interpretations
We poets often pride ourselves on exploiting the many interpretations that figurative language affords us, and so we may shy away from visuals for fear they will detract from this ability to embody multiple meanings without sacrificing substance that we think separates “real” poetry from most prose. And though we may write poems inspired by visual art, we rarely include images of these works in books. Not so with Patrick Coleman’s Fire Season (102 pages; Tupelo Press). Initially, I expected the images paired with poems in the book to be too on the nose and/or to give away too much. …Continue reading
ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Carolyn Burke
Carolyn Burke was born in Sydney, spent many years in Paris, and now lives in California. Her 2011 No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, published by Knopf and Bloomsbury, has been translated into several languages, including French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Burke’s Lee Miller: A Life, published by Knopf and Bloomsbury in 2006, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award. Burke spent time with Lee Miller while working on her first book, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. The definitive biography of the expatriate artist/poet, it sparked a …Continue reading
‘The Collected Schizophrenias’ by Esmé Weijun Wang: A Map into Rarely Charted Waters
Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (202 pages; Graywolf Press) consists of twelve essays addressing the technical definitions, medical prognosis, and personal challenges of schizophrenia. In the first essay, Wang discloses her own diagnosis to the reader: during her time as an undergraduate at Yale, she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type), which she describes as an illness that combines certain behavioral markers of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She makes it clear the schizophrenias (of which there are a few types) are both complex and vast in how they are perceived and experienced. Wang manages to discuss such a …Continue reading
Interview with Erik Tarloff: Hollywood Endings
Berkeley novelist Erik Tarloff is a polymath. Growing up in Los Angeles, he was steeped in the motion picture industry (his father, Frank Tarloff, was a screenwriter), but he has also been deeply involved in politics, including stints as a speechwriter for Bill and Hillary Clinton and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, among others. He has satirized the Washington political scene in his acclaimed 1998 novel, Face-Time, about a speech-writer whose girlfriend is sleeping with the President, and taken a fictional look at the complicated political and personal dynamics of ‘60s Berkeley in All Our Yesterdays. He is also the …Continue reading
