Nonfiction Fiction Poetry In Conversation Art […]
Issue No. 131
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Our New 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, […]
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 […]
Jack Spicer’s California: From The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer
by Daniel Benjamin
Jack Spicer (1925–1965) was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Spicer’s radical theories of authorship and poetic dictation influenced a generation of poets, and they continue to resonate with contemporary writers and thinkers. Openly gay in an era of repression, he developed a poetics that merged mysticism, political resistance, and linguistic estrangement. Spicer’s letters are a vital component of his unique oeuvre; they radiate with the brilliance, ferocity, and vulnerability that characterize his poetry. In fall 2025—the year of Spicer’s centenary—Wesleyan University Press published Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, edited by […]
“A book is not interesting to me until it’s impossible for me to write”: Q&A with Robert Glück
by Benjamin Flaumenhaft
A chapter from Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist appeared in the very first issue of ZYZZYVA in 1985. It’s the chapter where Bob, Glück’s avatar and the novel’s narrator, leaves Jack, his lover, in bed and goes to the baths. There, he compares “an orgasm that can be read two ways” to a particular Victorian illusion painting that appears to fluctuate between a woman at a vanity and a skull. We vaguely remember an actual image of said painting from twenty or so pages earlier; the pictures in Jack the Modernist are dispersed, sort of like the pictures in Nadja, […]
Ever the Same: Bernadette Mayer’s ‘The Golden Book of Words’
by Maisie Bilston
Originally published in 1978, the late Bernadette Mayer’s poetry collection The Golden Book of Words is available again from New Directions, reissued with the gorgeous original cover design by Joe Brainard. The collection includes both better-known early poems like “Essay” (“I guess it’s too late to live on the farm / I guess it’s too late to move to a farm / I guess it’s too late to begin farming”) and a variety of other, equally vibrant and formally inventive poems such as “Simplicities are Glittering” and “What Babies Really Do.” Mayer, associated with the Language Poets and the New […]
A Kafka Gaze: ‘Animal Stories’ by Kate Zambreno
by Caio Driver
Standing at the monkey house in Jardin des Plantes, Kate Zambreno and her two-year-old daughter encounter an older woman who, though not an employee, leads them to the enclosure. Crowded by tourists’ flash photography, a newborn orangutan named Java nurses from her mother, Theodora. Zambreno mimes to her daughter—“milky”—in their shared language, and as they take in this special moment of connection with the captive primates, she also feels Theodora’s weariness, and wishes her privacy. The dailiness of the monkey house, she writes, is punctuated by events like these. When do we see ourselves most in zoo animals? During sharp […]
Beyond the Grasp of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s ‘Exophony’
by Maisie Bilston
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (192 pages; New Directions), acclaimed Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada’s first essay collection available in English, explores Tawada’s lifelong fascination with language, foreignness, and, more generally, “exophony,” which she understands as existence outside one’s mother tongue. The book, writes Lisa Hofmann-Kurada in her translator’s note, “is clearly addressed to a Japanese readership. In many ways the book is about the Japanese language itself.” As a result, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the actual matter of the essays—Tawada’s discussion of familiarity, understanding, and ignorance—and the writing’s sensibilities, associations, and perspectives, out of which its […]
Canterbury Chronicles: “Mercy” by Joan Silber
by Paul Wilner
Working through the morass of new fiction can be just that. The established names come and go—Pynchon, McEwan—perhaps not talking of Michelangelo, but somehow commodified, even when the authors are assiduously avoiding it. All the more reason to appreciate the subtleties of Joan Silber’s work. Her latest novel, Mercy (Counterpoint; 256 pages), manages to be at once a street-smart account of the perils of shooting heroin as a party game among East Village friends and a Canterbury Tales of a carefully constructed set of characters whose paths cross in seemingly coincidental (but non-Dickensian) ways. The connections depicted, and their consequences, […]
Issue No. 130
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Nonfiction Fiction Poetry In Conversation Art […]