Nonfiction Fiction Poetry In Conversation Art […]
Issue No. 132
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Where to Find Us
by ZYZZYVA Staff
ZYZZYVA Movie Night with Ingrid Rojas Contreras 6 p.m., Wednesday, July 1The Roxie3125 16th Street, San Francisco This year’s first Movie Night installment kicks off with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and features guest author T Kira Madden. Hosted by Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Editor Oscar Villalon. Tickets available here. In Conversation with Greg Sarris 6:30 p.m., Thursday, July 23City Lights Bookstore261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco Join us outdoors in Kerouac Alley as acclaimed author Sarris discusses his new novel, The Last Human Bear, with Editor Oscar Villalon. Free. Past Events Issue 131 Celebration at Local […]
Issue No. 131
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Nonfiction Fiction Poetry In Conversation Art […]
Issue No. 130
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Nonfiction Fiction Poetry In Conversation Art […]
Our T-Shirts & Totes
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Celebrate ZYZZYVA while looking stylish, too! The cream T-shirt comes in all sizes, features a ribbed neck, and is made from 100 percent USA cotton. Manufactured by Los Angeles Apparel, with the design printed by San Francisco’s Babylon Burning, this T-shirt is about as California as it gets. Order here. People have loved our red-and-blue totes, but now you have your choice of two color schemes to choose from. Our new offering is a black canvas tote with cream lettering—at once bold and elegant. Order here. And if you’d like to get either of these items along with a subscription, […]
Canon Wars Redux: On Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?
by Danielle Shi
Taste, Naomi Kanakia explains, is one facet of how Great Books shape us. Our ability to appreciate great literature, to “discriminate, to discern fine nuances, and to see what truly exists within an object, versus what we are projecting onto it,” is cultivated by reading classics made timeless by their rigor, honesty, and care. Through an intimate discourse on identity and literature, What’s So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) (272 pages; Princeton University Press), interrogates the canon. Kanakia’s comprehensive survey of books draws on several traditions, borrowing from […]
A Map of Desire: Thomas Dai’s Take My Name but Say It Slow: Essays
by Danielle Shi
In Thomas Dai’s essay collection Take My Name but Say It Slow (288 pages; Norton), Dai crafts deeply contemplative meditations on growing up Chinese American and navigating queer identity. The diptych of parallel reminisces that composes pieces such as “Running Days” and “Driving Days” evokes calm summers in Wenzhou made meaningful by his grandparents’ steady presence, as well as the particularities of traveling alone as an MFA student, styling himself after butterfly-lover Vladimir Nabokov and gay photographer Tseng Kwong Chi. Dai’s astute observations about identity fold back on themselves in Eastern-inflected asides on Chinese philosophy and nonbeing, and through nostalgic […]
Inventing a Joan: Q&A With Jake Rose
by Annie Delmedico
One poem in Jake Rose’s debut collection JOAN, which was published in April,reads: “sometimes a metaphysical door opens and you just have to / gawk and that’s when your mouth gets wide enough / to speak.” This line is an apt descriptor of the collection itself, which was the winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poets Book Prize. Collapsing biography and autobiography, the poetry of JOAN explores queer identity, grief, and desire through the life of Joan of Arc. The poems stretch and reach—through time, emotions, histories, and selves. They refuse the stagnancy of boundaries and assert transformation. Rose, a […]
Restored to Flight: Fifty Mothers by Preeti Vangani
by Danielle Shi
Preeti Vangani’s searing, sharp Fifty Mothers (67 pages; River River Books) captures the essence of grieving a parent. The linked poems in the collection reach for emotional highs and nadirs; rage makes peace with eros and falls back toward love. The collection, set in Bombay though Vangani now lives in San Francisco, is bookended by pages from the poet’s late mother’s college diaries, the first page taken from 1984-85. The diary’s details read like an erasure—what would have been her mother’s narrative overwritten by details about Vangani’s father’s identity, the couple’s shared bank account. The inclusion suggests Vangani’s light humor […]
Working Fires: A Look Inside the Life of Hotshots
by Caio Driver
In 2025, wildfires again broke records. The year began with the Eaton and Palisades fires, and over the course of the year, ten thousand more wildfires burned than the ten-year average. We live in a world where megafires occur with regularity, alongside disasters like the Lahaina, Palisades, and Eaton fires. While we may become inured to political headlines, the again-ness winning out, the proliferation of destructive wildfires continues to increase both in the American psyche and in reality. And who better to write on these fires than those who fight them? In three memoirs released last summer, authors recount their […]
After the Quake: Q&A with Nadia Terranova
by Sara Marinelli
The author of acclaimed novels that have been translated into many languages, Nadia Terranova is one of the most prominent voices of contemporary Italian literature. In 2020, her first novel translated into English, Farewell Ghosts, was published by Seven Stories Press and was translated by Ann Goldstein (the noted translator of Elena Ferrante). A critical success in Italy, the novel was awarded the Premio Alassio Centolibri and named a finalist for the Premio Strega. Her second and latest novel to be published in English, The Night Trembles, came out in 2025 from Seven Stories Press and also was translated by Goldstein. Last […]
A Poetics of Survival: On Richard Siken’s ‘Crush’ and ‘I Do Know Some Things’
by Ashley Wang
Richard Siken can’t help but love you. Supported by the scaffolding of the camera and the director’s chair, Crush, the author’s 2005 collection—selected by Louise Glück for the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award, and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award—demands your complicity. The speaker builds set after set and commands your presence within it: We’re shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me Spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth. (“Dirty […]
Remembering Analogically: ‘Analog Days’ by Damion Searls
by Benjamin Flaumenhaft
One day in June, the narrator of Damion Searls’s debut novella, Analog Days (120 pages; Coffee House Press), steps away from the narrative, allowing ambient coffee-shop dialogue to populate the pages: “Decaf soy latte! / Here. Thanks / It’s hot / Ooh!” It’s the first instance where the text seems to adhere to the reportage implied by the time stamps that structure its chronology (June 29, 2016), shedding story and morphing into notes in a journal. Here, the scene appears exclusively as quoted language, as information, the present breaking through the past tense that governs the novella up to this […]
An Ordinary Kind of Romance: ‘New Paltz, New Paltz’ by Mike Powell
by Benjamin Flaumenhaft
One day, Ben takes his lunch break at the museum across the street from his office. He asks a woman at the ticket desk about free admission; he’s been informed that the magazine he works for is a corporate sponsor. The woman counters with the museum’s universal “pay what you can” policy, in response to which Ben quickly and needlessly clarifies, “do you mean ‘pay what you want’?”. Ben is the hero of Mike Powell’s farcically ordinary novella, New Paltz, New Paltz (126 pages; Double Negative), and pointing out such meaningless discrepancies is one of his characteristic tasks. Ben, a […]
Vocabulary Lesson: ‘Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer’
by Paul Wilner
“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,’’ Jack Spicer wrote in “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.’’ The brilliant, troubled figure identified with the Berkeley Renaissance—a coterie of fellow littérateurs including Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser—cut his own cartographic path, calling on magic to bring his muse to life even as he was frustrated by the difficulties of finding the broader recognition he courted, and despised. The recent publication of Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer (512 pages; Wesleyan University Press) returns us to this complex world in voluminous depth. It was edited by […]