‘For McClure’

by Paul Wilner

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Debonair dude, bird thou never wert. Fly high, higher, highest, higher than that, far. Lionhearted lover roaring of sex, death and tantric miracles. You rode the wave, surfed above and beyond beatitudes to a still harmonic humming. Cool customer, hot to the touch. In Eternity, you pose the ecstatic, unanswerable koan. “Before you can pry any secrets from me you must first find the real me. Which one will you pursue?’’ Mane, mind and scrotum, you are ready to meet your Maker, and ours, in a blue velvet Paradise. Death be not proud, nor is it humble. Jesus, he was […]

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Shelter in Place Schedule

by Christine Sneed

Posted on by Zack Ravas

7 AM Rise from bed in a sunny mood 7:15 Drink coffee from home-roasted beans, painstakingly ground by hand with Japanese-engineered grinder while listening to northern mockingbird sing from the top of a nearby lemon tree. 7:20 Feel upsurge in mood after caffeine hit and read a New Yorker profile of a hearing impaired beekeeper 7:40 Feel good mood wane as neighbor starts blasting Meatloaf CD through the wall 7:43 Pound on wall 7:48 Pound on wall again 7:52 Pound on wall a third time while screaming 7:55 Go outside for exercise with face mask and gloves 8:02 Accidentally step […]

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In Memoriam: Eavan Boland

by Kenneth Fields

Posted on by Zack Ravas
(Image credit: Maura Hickey)

(Image credit: Maura Hickey) There are depths we cannot fathom. In this long season of losses, many of us have felt and will feel ourselves dropped into these depths with the death of loved ones. This is how many of us feel about the death of my friend and colleague, the Irish poet, Eavan Boland. She was born in Dublin in 1944 to Frances Kelly, a noted Irish painter and Frederick H. Boland, a famous diplomat. As director of Stanford’s Creative Writing Program for 24 years, she combined her artistic and diplomatic skills to negotiate among fellows, lecturers, faculty, donors, […]

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‘Sleeping with Strangers’ by David Thomson: In Great Company

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Reading the latest book by acclaimed film critic David Thomson, Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire (348 pages; Vintage), now out in paperback, one can’t help but suspect the book’s thesis may have changed over the course of its writing. A mixture of memoir, criticism, and film theory (“Why am I giving you history and memoir?” Thomson asks early on. “Because you cannot get close to movies without grasping the mindset in which they were received. When you go to the movies, you take your history with you. The fantasy is about you.”), the book was prompted by […]

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Distance and Richard Serra’s ‘Ballast’

by Dominica Phetteplace

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Ones of life’s pleasures is staring at something interesting, especially if it is also beautiful. And so I am bereft now that the museums and galleries are all closed. In response to shelter-in place, many museums are enhancing their virtual experiences. But I’ve yet to explore any of these offerings because the internet is full of horrors, and I feel the need to spend my leisure time away from my screen. I’m lucky to live near the UCSF Mission Bay Campus, which houses many works of outdoor art, including Richard Serra’s Ballast (2005). This piece has never felt more timely. […]

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ZYZZYVA Recommends April 2020: What to Read, Watch, & Listen To

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by Zack Ravas

March, April, soon to be May—there’s some sense that the days and weeks are blurring together as most of the nation remains under lockdown, but it’s our hope our readers are staying safe. We’re back once again to recommend some books, films, and other works that might offer welcome relief or distraction as we all Shelter in Place: Cade Johnson, Intern: As I get more accustomed to my Shelter in Place routine, I have been turning to books and music to inject a spark of novelty into my everyday. Luckily, Fiona Apple released her new record, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, […]

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National Poetry Month: ‘Peaceful Waters’

by Paul Wilner

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Run deep. The people we know, or think we know, or wish we were, if only we could find a way outside the prison of selfishness. Unlikely. One hundred years—or more— of solitude can’t break these walls. But, you know, there we have it. Other people. Maybe they can save us, maybe they can ruin us, maybe we can find a way into a twangy heaven, where people weep, and weep, and say how much they love us. What is love? Who is he, and what is he to you? Black, brown, beige and battered, like an old suitcase draped […]

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‘Ledger’ by Jane Hirshfield: An Insightful Vision

by Meryl Natchez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In the early 1900s in St. Petersburg in Russia, a group of passionate young poets came together and formed a poetic movement they called Acmeism. Its object was to strip away the florid symbolism then standard in Russian poetry, and create poems based on “the word itself.” Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova were two of the most famous of these poets, but were they around today, they would welcome Jane Hirshfield into their coterie. Her stark, powerful poems are crafted so simply they seem effortless. Constructed largely of nouns and verbs, the very things the Acmeists valued most, it’s hard […]

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National Poetry Month: ‘Northern California’

by Rage Hezekiah

Posted on by Zack Ravas

To celebrate National Poetry Month, we’ll be sharing a poem a week from our archives. The following poem, “Northern California” by Rage Hezekiah, is from Issue 116. You can read more poetry by Rage Hezekiah in the issue itself, which is currently available from our Store. You stood at the edge of the stone fruit orchard while I scaled the ladder, a picking basket against my belly, brimming with shiny-ripe plums. Father, you came to California willing to farm at my side, practiced shattered Spanish with the men I’d befriended. When I left after lunch to get high, you never said […]

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Q&A WITH KATE MILLIKEN: ‘KEPT ANIMALS’ AND WRITING A TREACHEROUS LANDSCAPE

by K.L. Browne

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In Kate Milliken’s first novel, Kept Animals (350 pages; Scribner), Topanga Canyon of the early ‘90s is an isolated, wild place, beautiful but vulnerable to the destruction and chaos of wildfire. Two teenage girls suffer loss one summer in this rugged canyon nestled beside a Los Angeles of wealth and celebrity. As they seek solace in one another, their connection ripples through the small community with dangerous consequences. Milliken’s clear-eyed telling weaves their story with that of Charlie, a young woman who two decades later searches into the mystery of this relationship and the fire that swept through Topanga. The […]

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National Poetry Month: “Object Permanence”

by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

Posted on by Zack Ravas

To celebrate National Poetry Month, we’ll be sharing a poem a week from our archives. The following poem, “Object Permanence” by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, is from our recent Bay Area Issue. You can read more great work from local poets in the issue itself, which is currently available from our Store. Yes, the red-tail who swooped across our windshield didn’t actually vanish in the gulley, circles still. And when the alarm wakes you, I trust that soft nest of curls will be safely conveyed  to hover at a chalkboard, fall in your eyes. But the calls keep getting closer. So straighten your tie, […]

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‘Child of Light’ by Madison Smartt Bell: Rolling Away the Stone

by Paul Wilner

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Too many literary biographies are a waste of space–a cut-and-paste pastiche of previously published materials, random interviews, and unselectively edited quotes, put together in the apparent rush of getting from A to Zed and be done with things. The funeral is more important than what preceded it. Madison Smartt Bell largely avoids these obstacles in Child of Light (588 pages; Doubleday), his masterly new biography of Robert Stone, in which he adheres to the Joseph Conrad dictum that Stone liked to quote: “Fiction must justify itself in every line.’’ Bell is also the editor of The Eye You See With, […]

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