ZYZZYVA Genres Archive: Poetry

The Blue Angels / The Spirituals App

by David Roderick

April 25, 2024

Posted on April 25, 2024 (April 25, 2024) by John McMurtrie

The Blue Angels Have you heard the sound of them during Fleet Week the threat of our brute aerial power flaying whole afternoons in formation and turgid fumes over the Bay my friend at the Chron says they fly 700 mph and 18 inches apart skimming the filigree of a sound barrier until they bang through fog like a truncheon hitting a skull I first heard them as a young man newly-arrived in SF and immediately thought more towers were about to fall bombs whistling down bridge cables snapped and yet another date enshrined with our national fear I ducked […]

The Köln Concert

by D.S. Waldman

March 26, 2024

Posted on March 26, 2024 (April 26, 2024) by John McMurtrie

We showed up with a U-Haul and a Prius and could not see the ocean. They lay it on thick there, a friend had said of Pacifica, two, three weeks at a time. We pulled off at the bluffs before taking our things to the cottage on Winona. Five hours it took for the cat

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The Voices of the Whales

by Isabel Zapata

February 1, 2024

Posted on February 1, 2024 (February 2, 2024) by John McMurtrie

Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers 1. I’m interested in the language of animals. 2. Whales, especially the humpback whale and the various subspecies of blue whale, are known to make repetitive sounds with different frequencies we consider to be songs. 3. When we look at animals, we hope to find virtues we lack. 4. Although sexual selection is thought to be their primary purpose, whale songs remain a mystery to scientists. 5. The human body is a symphony. (Charles Ives) 6. The universe is a symphony. (John Cage) 7. Nothing suggests that whales are trying to communicate with […]

Coup de Vieux

by David L. Ulin

November 22, 2023

Posted on November 22, 2023 (December 10, 2023) by John McMurtrie

For Tom Magee thrice in three nightsthe dead have come my waytwice it is youtwin cities accentrough and lowlike a globusin your throatI can hear the timbreyet I cannot carryback a word you say then last night my grandfatheran ancient apparitionif younger than hewould be aliveeighth of a millenniumsince his shtetl birth and allthat’s left

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Poetry Takes Bloom

by Tess Taylor

August 3, 2023

Posted on August 3, 2023 (August 21, 2023) by John McMurtrie

In the late spring of 2020, when everything seemed a bit bleak, I received a phone call from my old friend Hannah Fries, a poet who’d known me when I was writing poems and working on a farm in the Berkshires. Hannah is now an editor at Storey Press, and she had a fascinating proposal for me: Would

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‘Gardeners’ World,’ or What I Did During the Plague

by Cynthia White

Posted on August 3, 2023 (August 21, 2023) by John McMurtrie

“Gardeners’ World, or What I Did During the Plague” For that hour, only the earth of his garden. Dark and friable as chocolate cake, thronging with nematodes and fungi, more microbes in a spoon than humans on the planet. A fear-free hour. An hour without my trip-wired heart. Were you aware the peony, like the

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Q&A with Eileen Myles: Unwrapping time

by Valerie Braylovskiy

May 9, 2023

Posted on May 9, 2023 (May 9, 2023) by John McMurtrie

Poetry can encompass many shapes and qualities, including the singular capacity to open new pathways of understanding ourselves. A poet who achieves this feat is unafraid to take risks and question the quotidian. Eileen Myles has consistently been one of those poets. Myles’ newest poetry collection, a “Working Life” (Grove Atlantic Press, 267 pages), is perhaps their deepest and most personal exploration of what it means to be human. Myles says that “maybe time is the real subject of language,” and uses temporality to explore personal and public moments within a broader sociopolitical landscape. Born in Boston and now living […]

Bearing Witness: ‘Bone Country,’ by Linda Nemec Foster

by Gus Berg

May 2, 2023

Posted on May 2, 2023 (May 2, 2023) by John McMurtrie

In Bone Country (110 pages; Cornerstone Press), the thirteenth poetry collection by Linda Nemec Foster, each poem is a snapshot, presented in a fragmented style that emphasizes the intensity of each image. Despite this fragmentation, the collection is united by a quick rhythm that propels the reader. Every piece is imbued with an intense sense of place in Europe. Warsaw, Krakow, Bratislava, the Tatra Mountains, Now Sac, Rzeszow, Tarnow, and the Baltic Sea all make early appearances. Poland is the central focus, from the beauty of natural landscapes to the horrors of war and occupation. The collection explores the tension […]

Keeping It Light: ‘Always Alwaysland: New Poems’ by Stanley Moss

by Megan Luebberman

April 26, 2023

Posted on April 26, 2023 (May 12, 2023) by John McMurtrie

Having written several volumes over half a century, the critically acclaimed American poet Stanley Moss continues to offer galvanizing ideas, images, and feelings in his work. His latest, Always Alwaysland (239 pages; Seven Stories Press), contains more than 100 poems covering a wide range of personal, philosophical, and political topics. Using fanciful free verse and occasional rhyme schemes, Moss takes readers through his vivid memories and endless imagination. While Always Alwaysland has no unifying theme, there are recurring ideas, such as the concept of language, reading, and poetry itself. Moss continually comments about the nature of the poet and […]

Broken Home: ‘Archipelago,’ by Laila Malik

by Zoe Binder

April 25, 2023

Posted on April 25, 2023 (April 25, 2023) by John McMurtrie

From the first piece in her debut poetry collection, Archipelago (86 pages; Book*hug Press), Laila Malik ponders the complexity and impermanence of home, a concept that sometimes stretches across continents. The metaphorical loss of place through multigenerational migration and the literal loss of land through climate change are connected in each of the collection’s four sections (“precambrian”; “petroleum by-products”; “half-life of exile”; and “kufic”). Many of the pieces in Archipelago are written in the second person, interspersed with the expanded first-person perspective “we,” transforming a collection of personal reflections into a subtle set of instructions. Malik’s poems carry […]

My California

by Lee Herrick

January 6, 2023

Posted on January 6, 2023 (January 5, 2023) 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 […]

My Unsent Letter to You

by W. S. Di Piero

January 2, 2023

Posted on January 2, 2023 (January 1, 2023) 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, […]

Genre: Poetry