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Tag Archives: poems
National Poetry Month: ‘Creation Myth’ by Austen Leah Rosenfeld
April represents National Poetry Month, intended as a way to spread awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. To celebrate, each Wednesday we will be taking a deep dive into both ZYZZYVA’s recent and distant past to share some choice selections. For the third week of April, we present Austen Leah Rosenfeld’s poem “Creation Myth” from ZYZZYVA No. 107, Fall 2016: In the beginning, there was only darkness. Not the dark of the prairie at night, fireflies nestled like hot pearls in the grass. More like the sense of something approaching, weaving a black basket in the sky. Days …Continue reading
Posted in Excerpts
Tagged austen leah rosenfeld, creation myth, National Poetry Month, poem, poems, poet, Poetry
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ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Dean Rader
Dean Rader (whose poetry has been published in ZYZZYVA Issues No. 93 , 98 & 101) is the author of several books, including the poetry collections Works & Days (winner of the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize), Landscape Portrait Figure Form, which was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2013, and the forthcoming Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, to be published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press. ZYZZYVA Managing Editor Oscar Villalon talked to Rader about what makes for a “successful” poem, how his work has come to be shaped, the attraction …Continue reading
Posted in Video Interviews
Tagged basketball, Dean Rader, Golden State, Oklahoma, Oscar Villalon, poems, Poetry, San Francisco, Warriors
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The Dialogue Between Motherhood and War: ‘Blood Lyrics’ by Katie Ford
In her most recent book of poetry, which came out in late 2014, Katie Ford offers a raw and thoughtful look at the frailty of life, tracing the fragile line traversed alike by her premature infant daughter and the countless victims of war. Blood Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 62 pages) resembles a book of hymns, hauntingly personal, one piece coursing like blood into the next. Some of these poems ought to be delivered in a funereal whisper, others chanted to the rhythm of pumping hearts. Life and death are intimately connected, one necessitating the other. In the first poem, “A Spell,” …Continue reading
The Beauty and Violence of a Family and of a Nation: Q&A with Sasha Steensen
“We took shelter from where / why,” writes Sasha Steensen in the opening lines House of Deer (Fence Books; 88 pages). Like most of the others, this poem, “Domestication and the Chase,” visits the rural Ohio where Steensen’s back-to-the-land parents raised her, proposing along the way new definitions of family, wildness, and the lyric form. Threading through personal and national memories, Steensen navigates the charged spaces between mother- and daughterhood, fairytale and anecdote, human and animal, and nostalgia and radical disenchantment. If coming of age in 1970s America disabused the poet of her childhood idealism, this book charts its revival; …Continue reading
Posted in Interviews
Tagged collection, Hart Crane, House of Deer, hybrid, poems, Sasha Steensen
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The Lone Survivor Bears Witness to Atrocity: Jessica Bozek’s ‘The Tales’
The Tales by Jessica Bozek (Les Figues Press, 78 pages) consists mostly of prose poems from a variety of first-person narrators, all on the subject of a fictional genocide known as “Operation Sleep.” Inspired largely by the literature of witness, on which she based a seminar at Boston University called Reading Disaster, Bozek tells the grim story of a land whose citizens die en masse upon a visitation from a soldier who hails from a powerful nation and is fluent in the local tongue. When the soldier speaks, the people of the land sink into the earth—except one, known as …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged Jessica Bozek, Les Figues Press, poems, prose, The Tales
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The Poet Finds His Voice Through the War Reporter: Q&A with Dan O’Brien
Dan O’Brien is an award-winning Los Angeles playwright and poet whose poetry appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 95 (Fall 2012). His most recently published work, War Reporter (Hanging Loose Press; 132 pages), is a collection of poems focusing on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Canadian reporter and author Paul Watson. We talked to Dan O’Brien via email about his work focusing on the life and career of Watson, a subject, he says, that “has helped me find a way to write both intimately and politically at the same time.” ZYZZYVA: Before working on these poems, you wrote a play, directed by Bill Rauch, …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged Dan O'Brien, Hanging Loose Press, Paul Watson, poems, War Reporter
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