Contributor: Annie Delmedico

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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Meet Our New Senior Editor: Q&A with Manjula Martin

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Manjula Martin joined ZYZZYVA’s masthead this April as our new Senior Editor. Previous to ZYZZYVA, she was the managing editor of the lauded Zoetrope: All-Story, the literary magazine owned by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola which won the National Magazine Award for fiction during her tenure. Martin is the coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, winner of the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Most recently, she is the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award this year and has been reissued in […]

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At the Edge and Then Past It: ‘Audition’ by Pip Adam

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Pip Adam’s boundless and mythic new novel, Audition (Coffee House Press; 217 pages), begins with three giants trapped on a spaceship, exiled from Earth. As they hurtle through space, Alba, Stanley, and Drew speak to each other; if they stop talking, their bodies will resume growing larger and, eventually, break open the ship. This opening section, consisting entirely of dialogue, is disoriented and disorienting. The trio struggles to describe their situation. “Are you getting bigger?” they ask each other. “Were we quiet and time has passed?” They can recall being in a classroom before being put on the spaceship Audition, […]

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