For many Americans, the phrase “The Man with His Finger on the Button” has never registered as so ominous and disturbing as with a President as ill-tempered and braggadocios as Donald Trump in the White House. As Mark Doten’s latest novel, Trump Sky Alpha (288 pages; Graywolf Press), opens, those fears are realized when a crippling cyber-attack on America’s infrastructure prompts President Trump to unleash the country’s nuclear arsenal upon its perceived enemies. “The loss of life, it’s always tragic,” Trump intones from his massive zeppelin-like fortress, the titular Trump Sky Alpha. “But it’s been incredible. The results that we’ve […]
‘Midnight, Talking about our Exes’ by Ada Limón: National Poetry Month
by Ada Limón
April represents National Poetry Month, intended as a way to spread awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. To celebrate, each week we will be taking a look back at ZYZZYVA’s recent and distant past to share some choice selections. For our third installment, we present “Midnight, Talking about our Exes” by Ada Limón from ZYZZYVA No. 94: The sun is still down and maybe even downer. Two owls, one white and one large-eared, dive into a nothingness that is a field, night-beast in the swoop-down, (the way we all have to make a living). Let’s be owls tonight, stay […]
‘Bright Stain’ by Francesca Bell: A Universe of Pain
by Meryl Natchez
Francesca Bell’s first book of poetry, Bright Stain (104 pages; Red Hen Press), reflects a dark universe in which sexual pleasure and pain are intricately linked. There are bright moments of delight, but few without an aftertaste. This debut collection is impressive for it’s distinctive voice and pungent imagery. Many of the poems deal with the jolts of adolescent sexual awakening, its heat and surprise and terror, and Bell is not afraid of putting both her vulnerability and hunger on display: By fourteen, I had transformed, body gone from tight-fisted to extravagant… No blouse would button over my excess. Nothing […]
‘My Madness is My Love Toward Mankind’ by Devon Walker-Figueroa: National Poetry Month
by Devon Walker-Figueroa
April represents National Poetry Month, intended as a way to spread awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. To celebrate, each weeek we will be taking a look back at ZYZZYVA’s recent and distant past to share some choice selections. For our second installment, we present “My Madness is My Love Toward Mankind” by Devon Walker-Figueroa from ZYZZYVA No. 112: For Nijinsky People are mistakes and I do not want to commit any. Opinions are in me. God is in me. More than anything, immobility is an invented thing. I have two ends and they are both on fire. Because […]
‘Little Boy’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Life as an Endless Novel
by Casey Jong
“And so do I return to the monologue of my life seen as an endless novel.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Little Boy (179 pages; Doubleday) is aptly self-identified as “unapologetically unclassifiable” on its jacket copy, and the poet Billy Collins called it a “torrent of consciousness” in his own review. Both descriptions are fitting for the short but powerful work by the now 100-year-old Ferlinghetti. Little Boy begins as a rather fast-paced novel, narrated in the third person, based on Ferlinghetti’s childhood. It tells the story of Little Boy, who was raised by his Aunt Emily, later was moved to an orphanage, and […]
‘The Altruists’ by Andrew Ridker: The Good Life
by Katie O'Neill
Andrew Ridker’s first novel, The Altruists (308 pages; Viking), follows a middle-class family, the Alters, as they struggle with the impact of unexpected wealth. Ridker is merciless in skewering each member of the family, and nearly every aspect of modern culture, from campus identity politics and the queer dating scene to poorly planned foreign aid missions. The novel’s wickedly dark sense of humor combines with a complex plot to create a compelling debut. The story centers around Arthur Alter, a rapidly aging, untenured professor at a middling St. Louis university who is close to defaulting on the mortgage for his […]
‘Astray’ by John Sibley Williams: National Poetry Month
by Zack Ravas
April represents National Poetry Month, intended as a way to spread awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. To celebrate, each week we will be taking a look back at ZYZZYVA’s recent and distant past to share some choice selections. To begin the month, we present John Sibley Williams’ poem “Astray” from ZYZZYVA No. 112:A neighborhood gone missing. Only the torn electrical tape that held it together remains of the cul-de-sac where most of us learned to drive in circles. No bedroom windows left for songbirds to strike each morning or streets made of tin foil or walls of […]
In the Spring Issue
by ZYZZYVA
In this issue: On Art Nonfiction Sallie Tisdale on touring the antiquities of Rome, Glen David Gold on tracking down a Gorey original, Heather Altfeld on the enduring gaze of John Berger, Paisley Rekdal on erasure and Paul Klee. Fiction Ben Greenman’s “Polyptych” (a divorced man and a painting that must be observed just so), Toni Martin’s “Director’s Cut” (a woman’s life as reconfigured through a foreign filmmaker’s sensibilities), and Peter Orner’s “Pacific” (an elderly couple—a sculptor and a potter—and the very end of things). Poetry Dan Alter, Denver Buston, Troy Jollimore, Rusty Morrison, Mira Rosenthal, and Alexandra Teague. In […]
Q&A with Andrew Ridker: The Absurdity of the Facts of Things
by Andrew David King
It’s hard not to see Andrew Ridker’s acerbic, cerebral first novel, The Altruists (319 pages; Viking)—which has attracted attention from NPR and The Times, among others—as an answer to the question of how to think about, let alone write about, a major strain of American life in 2019. The plot centers around a family at once archetypal and painfully real: Arthur, a pedantic, regret-filled professor who finds tenure elusive; his psychotherapist wife, Francine, whose premature death from breast cancer was worsened by Arthur’s cheating on her in the terminal stages of her illness; their daughter, Maggie, a sanctimonious, kleptomaniac tutor; […]
On Creating the Orcas Island Lit Fest
by Scott Hutchins
When my friend Jule Treneer asked me if I wanted to start a literary festival, we were standing in a park, watching his son bounce up and down on a trampoline. It was summer, and I felt, like the boy, that I had excess energy to burn. The festival’s shape and focus were amorphous, but the location was definite. Orcas Island, a beautiful, two-lobed protrusion of volcanic plate in the San Juan archipelago in Washington State, but so far north the island is tucked into Canada. Orcas was a key place for Jule growing up, and his mother had recently […]
ZYZZYVA Recommends March 2019: What to Read, Watch, & Listen to
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Before we head off to Portland for AWP ’19, we thought we would share what ZYZZYVA recommends this month—a roundup of the works we’ve been reading, watching, and listening to: Katie O’Neill, Intern: The abundance of streaming services available online have largely killed any urge I have to watch live TV. Outdated advertisement breaks combined with the difficulty of committing to a set time make it more effort than it’s generally worth to catch a program as it airs. But, every Wednesday night at 9pm I can be found in front of my TV tuned in to SYFY to catch […]
‘Fire Season’ by Patrick Coleman: Intergenerational Interpretations
by Annah Omune Sidigu
We poets often pride ourselves on exploiting the many interpretations that figurative language affords us, and so we may shy away from visuals for fear they will detract from this ability to embody multiple meanings without sacrificing substance that we think separates “real” poetry from most prose. And though we may write poems inspired by visual art, we rarely include images of these works in books. Not so with Patrick Coleman’s Fire Season (102 pages; Tupelo Press). Initially, I expected the images paired with poems in the book to be too on the nose and/or to give away too much. […]