Poetry Archives – ZYZZYVA

‘Trace Evidence’ by Charif Shanahan: Worlds Apart

by Valerie Braylovskiy

April 4, 2023

Posted on April 4, 2023 (March 30, 2023) by Zack Ravas

Trace Evidence (93 pages; Tin House Press) is the second collection of poetry by Charif Shanahan, author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing. These poems use language and form to peel back elements of Shanahan’s identity and show how markers like nationality, race, and sexuality intersect within one’s lived experience. The poems feel deeply personal yet rooted in the universal as Shanahan raises profound questions about human nature and what it means to feel displaced in the world. Born in the Bronx to an Irish American father and Moroccan mother, Shanahan— a professor at Northwestern University— discusses his […]

‘Meltwater’ by Claire Wahmanholm: Mother, Earth

by Zoe Binder

March 31, 2023

Posted on March 31, 2023 (March 30, 2023) by Zack Ravas

Claire Wahmanholm’s latest poetry collection, Meltwater (128 pages; Milkweed Editions), is both a lament for the Earth as it suffers the harmful effects of climate change and a poignant reminder of the joys that make life worthwhile despite this loss. Wahmanholm centers the collection on two recurring series of poems—“Glacier” and “Meltwater”—that follow the anxieties of a person raising children on our threatened planet. In “Glacier,” the speaker battles feelings of grief at the sight of a calving glacier—and guilt at the thought of children experiencing a world without these geological formations: I am trying to say it’s too late […]

‘Feast’ by Ina Cariño: Food for Thought

by Gus Berg

March 29, 2023

Posted on March 29, 2023 (March 28, 2023) by Zack Ravas

Ina Cariño, the recipient of a 2022 Whiting Award and a 2021 Alice James Award, is a Filipinix American poet whose work draws heavily on intergenerational nourishment and transformation in marginalized communities. Feast (100 pages; Alice James Books), their first book of poetry, is an enriching collection that satisfies a primal hunger for fulfillment while questioning the social conditions that leave people of color deprived. One of the most disarming things about Feast is the bone-deep rawness of this poet’s voice. Even as they veer away from the realm of possibility, the poems feel real because the speaker’s voice remains […]

‘An Ordinary Life’ by B.H. Fairchild: The Winding Road of Grief

by Gus Berg

February 24, 2023

Posted on February 24, 2023 (February 23, 2023) by Zack Ravas

In his latest poetry collection, An Ordinary Life (67 pages; W. W. Norton), B.H. Fairchild, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the author of the collections The Art of the Lathe (1998) and Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2002) , doesn’t flinch from the foxholes remembered secondhand in “My Father, Fighting the Fascists in WWII” or from images of a Korean War veteran bagging canned goods without fingers in “Groceries.” Fairchild offers succinct commentary with discrete but vivid imagery, honoring the beauty of small-town scenes with artistry and exactitude, transforming even a Walmart on […]

Q&A with Rebecca Foust: ‘Only’ & Communicating Across the Centuries

by Meryl Natchez

February 10, 2023

Posted on February 10, 2023 (February 9, 2023) by Zack Ravas

I first met Rebecca Foust when we worked together for Marin Poetry Center starting in 2014. Foust is the author of seven poetry collections, including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, Paradise Drive, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, and God, Seed. Her work has received the 2020 Pablo Neruda Award, the 2017 CP Cavafy Award, and the 2016 James Hearst Poetry Prize, and was runner up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. In 2017 she was appointed Marin County Poetry Laureate. I have been intrigued by her new book of poems, Only (Four Way Books 2022; 88 pages), a varied, tender, […]

Q&A with Tayi Tibble

by Craig Santos Perez

February 8, 2023

Posted on February 8, 2023 (February 17, 2023) by Zack Ravas

Tayi Tibble, whose first book of poems, Poūkahangatus, was published by Knopf this year, is an exciting and essential voice of the next generation of Pacific Islander authors. Of indigenous Māori descent, Tibble grew up in Porirua, north of Wellington in Aotearoa (New Zealand), where Poūkahangatus was first published by Victoria University Press in 2018. (Her poetry also appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 123.) The concept of whakapapa—the Māori term for genealogy—is an important part of her collection. More than a simple list of names, whakapapa is a core element of mātauranga Māori, or traditional Māori knowledge. It articulates the living […]

Air Sirens Wailed: Q&A with Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel

by Ilya Kaminsky

January 9, 2023

Posted on January 9, 2023 (January 9, 2023) by Zack Ravas

Visiting Odesa, Ukraine, this July, I met with Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel, two well-known Russian-language poets who decided to leave Moscow for Odesa before the war began. Maria Galina is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Little Boondock, Mole-Crickets, and Iramifications, which was published in English by GLAS New Russian Writing. She is also a prize-winning poet and literary critic and a regular columnist for the literary journal Novyi Mir. Arkady Shtypel‘s debut poetry collection was published when he was fifty-eight. Since then, he has published five more books of poetry. He is also a […]

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, […]

My Ancestors Send Me Screenshots

by Tayi Tibble

December 30, 2022

Posted on December 30, 2022 (December 29, 2022) by Zack Ravas

My ancestors send me screenshots of your group chats dissecting me with all the science of your founding fathers and the sympathy of your murdering mothers wanting to know who I am where I’ve been and who I’ve been with. What the fuck is a whakapapa? Do I carry it in my pussy? In a tiny baggy? Like a real 1? Like a down-ass bitch? Do I have a heart? And does it bleed? Like a steak? If it’s brutalised enough? If it’s served? On a plate? With proper silverware? And presented to your queen still beating would she care? […]

Q&A with Kathleen Balma: ‘From Your Hostess at the T&A Museum’ and the Urgent Need to Describe

by Danielle Shi

November 2, 2022

Posted on November 2, 2022 (November 3, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Kathleen Balma demonstrates a prodigious fluency with language in her intelligent and entertaining first poetry collection, From Your Hostess at the T&A Museum (96 pages; Eyewear Publishing), in which monkeys battle for social cachet, time grounds to a startling weather-bending halt, and voices become vehicles of desire when arriving at the right destination. Cleverly imagining the ordinary into shapes exceptional and witty, Balma uses an affectionate yet sardonic tongue to interrogate images as familiar to us as Abe Lincoln’s cabin to the ruins of Pompeii to the moon landing. For aficionados of art history, visual splendor abounds: Olympia and Aphrodites […]

‘Fudekara’ by Liliana Ponce: Evolution Through Repetition

by Roz Naimi

September 27, 2022

Posted on September 27, 2022 (September 26, 2022) by Zack Ravas

“Why write confessions? Why confess the written?” asks Liliana Ponce in her poetry collection Fudekara (44 pages; Cardboard House Press; translated by Michael Martin Shea). Ponce is a poet and scholar of Japanese literature from Buenos Aires, Argentina, who incorporates her knowledge of Japanese culture into her work: “Fudekara” is a Japanese neologism created from the terms “fude” (brush) and “kara” (from) to mean “from the brush.” Written over the course of a Chinese ideograph calligraphy class the author took in 1993, Fudekara takes as its subject the stroke: the iterative, meditative practice of putting pen to paper. The collection […]