Announcing our next Writers’ Workshop: Lori Ostlund on 3rd-Person Close Perspective

by ZYZZYVA

Posted on by Zack Ravas

We’re pleased to announce our next Writers’ Workshop: Lori Ostlund on 3rd-Person Close Perspective. This Zoom-based Writers’ Workshop will take place on April 22nd from 11am to 2pm PST. Purchase your ticket today (and please feel free to spread the word to any of your writer friends!). “I’ve found that often people think that 3rd-close is just a variation on 1st-person, or that widening the distance from the character means that the narrator becomes invisible or neutral, even bland,” says instructor Lori Ostlund, “but I think of 3rd-person close as a way to have the best of both worlds: to […]

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Q&A with Rebecca Foust: ‘Only’ & Communicating Across the Centuries

by Meryl Natchez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I first met Rebecca Foust when we worked together for Marin Poetry Center starting in 2014. Foust is the author of seven poetry collections, including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, Paradise Drive, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, and God, Seed. Her work has received the  2020 Pablo Neruda Award, the 2017 CP Cavafy Award,  and the 2016 James Hearst Poetry Prize, and was runner up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. In 2017 she was appointed Marin County Poetry Laureate. I have been intrigued by her new book of poems, Only (Four Way Books 2022; 88 pages), a varied, tender, […]

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Q&A with Tayi Tibble

by Craig Santos Perez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Tayi Tibble, whose first book of poems, Poūkahangatus, was published by Knopf this year, is an exciting and essential voice of the next generation of Pacific Islander authors. Of indigenous Māori descent, Tibble grew up in Porirua, north of Wellington in Aotearoa (New Zealand), where Poūkahangatus was first published by Victoria University Press in 2018. (Her poetry also appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 123.) The concept of whakapapa—the Māori term for genealogy—is an important part of her collection. More than a simple list of names, whakapapa is a core element of mātauranga Māori, or traditional Māori knowledge. It articulates the living […]

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‘Dr. No’ By Percival Everett: Bond Upended

by Charlie Barton

Posted on by Zack Ravas

A black, autistic mathematician, Wala Kitu is not James Bond—but he is the hero of Percival Everett’s anti-Bond, Bond novel, Dr. No (262 pages; Graywolf Press). The book, now a National Book Critics Circle award finalist, is very much a spy thriller—filled with sports cars, hench-people, secret submarines, and hidden shark traps—even though Everett radically subverts the classic 007 formula. Wala’s love interest is another autistic mathematician, Eigen Victor, a specialist in topology with a tendency to state the obvious. And the nefarious super-villain is John Sill, a self-made Black billionaire whose sole purpose is to destroy America, to exact […]

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A Conversation with Kathryn Ma

by John McMurtrie

Posted on by Zack Ravas

The title of Kathryn Ma’s new novel, The Chinese Groove, refers to one young man’s fanciful term for a silent understanding that he believes unites Chinese people across borders and throughout generations. This code, he is convinced, is what will guide him as he leaves behind a life of poverty in Yunnan Province and embarks

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The Y

by Bethany Ball

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Back then, Yale sat behind the front desk counter in the resident section of the Y and I sat beside him. Reggie worked maintenance and had the gray cast and steady hands of a true alcoholic. He was always on time and reliable. Robert was a resident and lived on the sixth floor. He had

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.)

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Air Sirens Wailed: Q&A with Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel

by Ilya Kaminsky

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Visiting Odesa, Ukraine, this July, I met with Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel, two well-known Russian-language poets who decided to leave Moscow for Odesa before the war began. Maria Galina is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Little Boondock, Mole-Crickets, and Iramifications, which was published in English by GLAS New Russian Writing. She is also a prize-winning poet and literary critic and a regular columnist for the literary journal Novyi Mir. Arkady Shtypel‘s debut poetry collection was published when he was fifty-eight. Since then, he has published five more books of poetry. He is also a […]

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House to House: Voices from a Refugee Center in Odesa

by Oleg Suslov

Posted on by Zack Ravas

“Until February 24, 2022, I had never written about the war. A journalist needs to have the specific vocabulary, terminology. Until this full-scale invasion, I did not have the terminology of war.” But these days, Oleg Suslov, the 58-year-old editor of the Odesa Evening News, is writing mostly about the war. “This September,” he says, “in the middle of the war, my daughter will give birth…Explosions woke me at 5 a.m. My daughter calls. Dad, what is this? My daughter has three children and at this moment she is pregnant with her fourth.” “That is how I remember it,” Oleg […]

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My California

by Lee Herrick

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Here, an olive votive keeps the sunset lit, the Korean twenty-somethings talk about hyphens, graduate school, and good pot. A group of four at a window table in Carpinteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi. Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano poet whose songs still bank off Fresno’s beer-soaked gutters and almond trees in partial blossom. Here, in my California, we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy you’d think we’d done this before. In Fresno, the bullets tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day. In […]

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After Dark

by Rhoda Huffey

Posted on by Zack Ravas

When the pigeon first appeared in my front yard, I noticed because he didn’t fly off immediately. He walked over to the jade plant by my front porch and contemplated the leaves of the succulent. My mind was full of other things at that moment: what to wear to that evening, did a man named

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‘All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End’ By Charles Johnson: The Humor of Politics

by Charlie Barton

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Charles Johnson’s collection of comics, All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson (280 pages; New York Review Comics), is an especially provocative yet conscious-raising read in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Spanning his entire career as a cartoonist—starting decades before his novel Middle Passage won the 1991 National Book Award—the collection focuses mainly on his most prolific era during the 1960s and 1970s, when his work explored black radicalism and the racism that birthed it. The comic strip may seem unfit for such weighty matters, but in the hands of Johnson—novelist, philosopher, […]

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My Unsent Letter to You

by W. S. Di Piero

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I’m writing in December. The almanacs call this a cold full moon. I watch it shadow through its veils. My book says of amor fati: want nothing more than what comes at you; love necessity; relive life’s phases in round time, evermore. Pain, unpain, joy, pain, groceries, car woes, plague. Our master plan of repetitions that can’t be planned for. We’ll never want things back. We’ll rush every instant as the last. I say love. I repeat it. I want to drink the lived, absent episodes of any hour, as we drink each other’s words, on the porch, under trees, […]

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