The poetry collection Bullets into Bells (Beacon Press) stands as an innovative response to American gun violence. The work is a collection of poetry, each poem paired with a prose response written by an “activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual.” Many of the poems are in response to widely reported shootings, such as Sandy Hook or the murder of Tamir Rice, but there are also several accounts of less publicized shootings. Despite the high coverage of gun violence in the media, reading this book gives the sense that this type of violence is even more pervasive than it seems, and that nearly […]
Tag: Poetry
What We’re Reading this Women’s History Month
by ZYZZYVA Staff
March represents Women’s History Month and, as such, we thought we would share a brief overview of some of the women we’ve been reading as of late, which includes a group of authors operating within a myriad of genres and hailing from a number of locales. We hope this collection serves as just a small sampling of the dynamic work being done by women in literature and non-fiction today. Laura Cogan, Editor: “No one knew the real story but me,” declares one of Joan Silber’s exquisitely drawn characters near the end of Improvement. It is both a brag and a burden this character bears—and a […]
‘Pack Time’ by Christina Olson: ZYZZYVA No. 111, Winter Issue
by Christina Olson
Christina Olson is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Terminal Human Velocity (Stillhouse Press) and Before I Came Home Naked (Ankylosaurus Press). She teaches creative writing at Georgia Southern University. Two of Olson’s poems are featured in ZYZZYVA No. 111. Presented here in its entirety is the poem “Pack Time”: In late May, the men succumbed to winter madness, shaving their heads and posing amid great hilarity while Hurley immortalized the moment with a photograph. —from Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition Who can blame them—their ship sunk in pack ice. The dark days looping like a tape reel. The sled dogs snoozing away in their dogloos. […]
Letting the Light in: ‘Recent Changes in the Vernacular’ by Tony Hoagland
by Meryl Natchez
Tony Hoagland, like Jack Spicer, is a master of wielding the needle of irony to inject you with the pain of being an aware human being. (Re-reading Spicer’s letters to Graham Macintosh in the July 1970 issue of Caterpillar reminded me of their shared sensibility.) Hoagland has a particular ability to pinpoint the ills and contradictions of the American psychic landscape using deadly serious humor. This was already evident in poems such as “Hard Rain,” “Dickhead,” “Foodcourt,” “At the Galleria Shopping Mall,” and “America.” Perhaps no one else in the contemporary poetry landscape creates such pitch-perfect expositions of our national […]
‘Still Life with Cacography’ by Dean Rader: ZYZZYVA No. 111, Winter Issue
by editor
Dean Rader is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco. His most recent poetry collections are “Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry” (Copper Canyon Press) and “Suture” (Black Lawrence), written with Simone Muench. You can see him in conversation with other ZYZZYVA contributors tomorrow at East Bay Booksellers. Two of Rader’s poems are featured in ZYZZYVA No. 111. Presented here in its entirety is the poem “Still Life with Cacography”: “If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here— right to their waist or right to their ankle—and one of the people in that room happened to have […]
Reflections in an Uncertain Era: ZYZZYVA Looks Back at Our Favorite Reads in 2017
by ZYZZYVA Staff
We can think of a lot of words to describe 2017, but “trying” would certainly be one. If you’re anything like the team at ZYZZYVA, you’ve found yourself reaching for book covers new and familiar as both a source of comfort and intellectual edification during these tumultuous times. As 2017 winds to a close, we thought we would take a look back at some of the titles that proved most memorable for us. What was your favorite book you read this year (whether it was published in 2017 or not)? Feel free to share in the Comments section. Bjorn Svendsen, Intern: In Thrill Me: […]
‘What If My Mother’ by Victoria Chang: ZYZZYVA No. 111, Winter Issue
by Victoria Chang
What if my mother never protested was never pro anything never probed beyond the small yard where the bees lived with their constant buzzing what if my mother matched the bees in their compliant striped dresses minding their own business afraid to wander too far from the work that paid honey afraid to wander too far from the one queen they served but maybe the bees are not just working maybe the bees make all that noise because they are hiding things because they don’t like where they live are really livid not timid not just little serfs in striped […]
ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Matthew Zapruder
by editor
Poet, translator, professor, and editor Matthew Zapruder was born in Washington, DC. in 1967. He earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he studied with Dara Wier, James Tate, and Agha Shahid Ali. Zapruder is the author most recently of Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014) and Why Poetry, a book of prose about poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2017). An Associate Professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor […]
My American Self: Q&A with ‘Human Interest’ author Valerie Bandura
by Zack Ravas
“When the Kardashians talk/at once at each other/I hear an aria/to the first-person pronoun, an icon/as sleek as the four-inch stilettos,” Valerie Bandura writes early in her latest poetry collection, Human Interest (Black Lawrence Press; 75 pages). As a poet, her lens is trained on the America where millions live paycheck-to-paycheck and dream of game-show winnings even as television and our social media peddle visions of unobtainable celebrity. Bandura’s poems are not removed from the daily experience of most people, rather they are our experience, whether we’re wondering in traffic about the life of the driver who proudly displays his “Take the Migrant out of […]
Talking Shop: Troy Jollimore on Workshops, Content on Demand, & the Poetic Craft
by Kailee Stiles
Poet Troy Jollimore hurtled onto bedside tables everywhere when his widely celebrated debut, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006. Since then, his tightly wound, exploratory poetry has touched on everything from the the nature of beauty to meeting Charlie Brown in a bar. We are pleased to say Jollimore will be leading ZYZZYVA’s first ever Poetry Workshop. The deadline to submit your work is September 15th. The poet, who has appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 92, 101, and soon in 111, recently took time out of his busy schedule to talk with us about Writing Workshops, living […]
‘Alfonso’s Shadow Gets Away From Him’ by W.S. Di Piero: ZYZZYVA No. 109, Spring/Summer Issue
by editor
W.S. Di Piero is the author of several books of poetry and essays. His most recent book, Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebook (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), will be published in the fall.
The following is his poem “Alfonso’s Shadow Gets Away From Him” in its entirety. You can read two other poems from W.S. Di Piero, as well as an interview with him conducted by Andrew David King, by purchasing a copy of 109 here.
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When Home Isn’t Quite Home: ‘What It Done to Us’ by Essy Stone
by Aya Kusch
In her first collection of poetry, What It Done to Us (66 pages; Lost Horse Press), Essy Stone writes about an early life spent immersed in a Southern culture she deems toxic, where oppression and tradition are rooted in the collective mentality, often at the expense of women and minorities. She describes a landscape that is as suffocating as it is unsettling, where mountains have “heavy hands” and the valleys lie “cursed by generations of sunburned famers.” Her poems address the unstated yet generally understood rule that if you are born in the South you are somehow fated to stay […]