Category: News

ZYZZYVA news.

Inventing a Joan: Q&A With Jake Rose

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Author Jake Rose

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 […]

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Working Fires: A Look Inside the Life of Hotshots

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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 […]

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Where to Find Us

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Issue 132 and Cinco de Mayo Celebration 7 p.m., Tuesday, May 5City Lights Bookstore261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco Featuring short readings by contributors Anita Felicelli, Carolyn Burke, and Sarah Matsui, as well as refreshments. Hosted by Editor Oscar Villalon. Free. In Conversation with Vanessa Hua 7 p.m., Tuesday, May 12The Booksmith1727 Haight Street, San Francisco Hua, author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, discusses her new novel, Coyoteland, with Editor Oscar Villalon. Free. Issue 132 Poetry Reading at Golden Sardine 6 p.m., Thursday, May 21Golden Sardine Bar362 Columbus Ave., San Francisco An evening of poetry in North Beach, […]

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A Poetics of Survival: On Richard Siken’s ‘Crush’ and ‘I Do Know Some Things’

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Cover of Richard Siken's I Do Know Some Things

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 […]

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An Ordinary Kind of Romance: ‘New Paltz, New Paltz’ by Mike Powell

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The cover of Mike Powell's New Palz, New Palz

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 […]

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Choosing Each Other: Q&A with Jemimah Wei

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When Jemimah Wei and I met as Stegner Fellows in fiction at Stanford in 2023, we became instant friends. And during our time there, I got to workshop what would become her first novel, The Original Daughter (368 pages; Doubleday), a story about betrayal and complicated relationships that won my heart from the start. There’s something magical about watching what was once a Word document become a beautiful, finished book. (The novel’s official publication date is today!) Part coming of age, part coming apart, this book, set in Singapore, charts the course of two unforgettable characters, Gen and Arin, from […]

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Our T-Shirts & Totes

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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, […]

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The (Re)Discovery of Peter Carr

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On October 28, an exhibition titled “Peter Carr: Artist for Survival” opened at the Cerritos College Art Gallery in Norwalk, California. The show, which runs through December 13, is “the first comprehensive art historical retrospective of the poet, activist, and fascinating outsider artist,” according to the gallery. The following is by the show’s co-curator and ZYZZYVA contributor Andrew Tonkovich. The editor of the Santa Monica Review, Tonkovich was entrusted with Carr’s archive of “large-scale paintings, frenetic drawings, and homemade political posters, as well as his own personal notebooks, intimate sketches and studies, self-published books, and other biographically-significant ephemera” following Carr’s […]

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