Jack Spicer’s California: From The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer

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A scan of the first page of Jack Spicer's and Robin Blaser's letter to Robert Duncan and Jess, 1955

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 […]

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“A book is not interesting to me until it’s impossible for me to write”: Q&A with Robert Glück

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A black and white portrait of the author Robert Glück

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, […]

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Ever the Same: Bernadette Mayer’s ‘The Golden Book of Words’

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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 […]

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A Kafka Gaze: ‘Animal Stories’ by Kate Zambreno

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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 […]

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Beyond the Grasp of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s ‘Exophony’

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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 […]

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Canterbury Chronicles: “Mercy” by Joan Silber

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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, […]

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Prizing Possibility Over All: ‘A Toast to St Martirià’ by Albert Serra

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Encompassing moviemaking, personal history, and a defense of individual freedoms, Albert Serra’s spirited and opinionated manifesto A Toast to St Martirià (144 pages; Coffee House Press) pays tribute to the filmmaker’s hometown of Banyoles in northeastern Catalonia. Given as a public talk at the small town’s annual festival celebrating its patron saint, Serra’s speech (translated from the Catalan by Matthew Tree) reveals the surprising ways in which his trajectory has been determined by his humble place of origin. From the outset, the director focuses on locality, reveling in Banyoles’s valuation of emotional connection in contrast to the “nervous living” of […]

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Essay on Deprivation

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without a pot to piss in a rifle fires a caw of crows on cardboard on tents white wax burns the fingers god spits the residue the air shatters prayers candles made of glass moths bite to chase starlight casualties grow the rack holes of winter sweaters bark beetles eat the wooden floors backlogged services old brochures for caskets the mortuary is full a child is forced to hug hang barbwire another crunches on pixels of affection a band of copper horses trots down a polluted trail of power the clack of their steel hooves cracks con- crete silver dollars […]

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That I Should Stop Searching for Whoever I Was Before: ‘True Mistakes’ by Lena Moses-Schmitt

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The poems of Lena Moses-Schmitt’s new collection, True Mistakes (96 pages; University of Arkansas Press), feature those gaps of perception in which what is obvious or straightforward becomes supplanted by the relentless onslaught of experience. A finalist for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the collection traces that which we so often miss or move past in a hurry, and grounds us in a new mode of witness—where, “Like the sun, I can only look at you/when I don’t look.” Moses-Schmitt’s dazzling poems center the importance of carefully wrought introspection in negotiating the distance between writing and living. In its […]

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To Ride Is to Fall, To Live Is to Fall: ‘Riding’ by Pardis Mahdavi

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In 2000, U.S. author Pardis Mahdavi arrives in Tehran, determined to learn about a country she has only heard secondhand and sometimes sensational accounts of—tales of revolution and of the country as it existed during her parents’ emigration. Her scholarly interest in sexual politics and the emerging feminist movement in Iran leads her to cross paths with young women in the country’s underground who are leading a self-described “sexual revolution” in their open exploration of their bodies and intimate desires—a rebellion against the morally coded impositions and restrictions of a regime that has been in power since the Islamic Revolution […]

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