Quill & Parchment: FJORDS VOL 1

Publisher: Black Ocean
Publish Date: 3/6/2012
ISBN: 9780984475254
Binding: PAPERBACK
Price: $14.95

FROM THE PUBLISHER:
As one of the most exciting new voices in American poetry, Zachary Schomburg's previous books have enthralled thousands of
readers with surreal landscapes populated by gorillas in people clothes, jaguars, plagues of hummingbirds, and even Abraham
Lincoln. His poems have inspired art installations, shadow puppetry, rock albums, and string quartets. In FJORDS , Schomburg
inhabits the icy landscape, walking among all his little deaths as he explores the narrow inlets between the transcendent and
the mundane. These are poems to be read by torchlight or with no light at all. As Schomburg explains, There is so much blood
in the trees. It will be easy to fall in love like this.

"Zachary Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around."—Publishers Weekly

"Schomburg is possibly the man who will save poetry for all of those readers who are about to give up on the genre."—The Huffington Post

"Schomburg brings a sense of stringency to his dark but airy towers of invention, dismantling easy assumptions. The poems are fun
to read and they get below surfaces."—Robert Pinsky

"Poetry that aims, admirably, to unsettle. And who doesn't like to be haunted by a poem?"—Kelly Link

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Zachary Schomburg is the author of THE MAN SUIT (Black Ocean, 2007), SCARY, NO SCARY (Black Ocean, 2009), FJORDS VOL. 1
(Black Ocean, 2012) and The Book of Joshua (McSweeney's, forthcoming). He co-does Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He
lives in Portland, OR.

From the Book:

Building of Unseen Cats
by Zachary Schomburg

When I woke up, it was the middle of the night and
my building was on fire. The hallway was not filled
with smoke, and then quickly it was. I rescued a few
older men from their bathtubs, a few babies from
their cribs. Outside, the air was filled with hair.
Everyone but me was holding a plastic cage with a
cat in it. We weren't supposed to have cats in my
building, but there they all were, an invisible nation
suddenly uncurtained into a blinding and brutal
world. Everyone looked at me with a face that said
let's never speak o f this. Let's not look directly at what
is meant to be loved in secret. Let's, for example,
imagine the sea is always, constantly, and forever
spilling toward us, that our screaming building is
something worth escaping.

Audio: conversation with Joshua Marie Wilkinson @ The Pleistocene

Return to:

[New] [Archives] [Join] [Contact Us] [Poetry in Motion] [Store] [Staff] [Guidelines]