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Poetry. THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelg ngers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow. "The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness.... Schomburg may be one of ...
Poetry. SCARY, NO SCARY, the follow-up to Zachary Schomburg's acclaimed first collection of poems THE MAN SUIT, is a book of skeleton gloves and skeleton keys at once dark and playful. With loneliness and levity Schomburg takes the reader on a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own myth and folklore. Here there are new kinds of trees and new ways of naming the ages; jaguars and an abandoned hotel on the horizon. This book will crawl inside your chest and pump lava through your blood."
The people of Pie Time are suffering from God’s Finger, a mysterious plague that leaves its victims dead with a big hole through their chests. In each hole is a random consumer product. Mano Medium, a sensitive, young cigarette-factory worker in love, does his part by quitting the factory to work double-time as Pie Time’s replacement barber and butcher, and by holding the things found in the holes of the newly dead. However, the more people die, the bigger Mano becomes. XO, the power-hungry corporation bent on overtaking Pie Time, and Father Mothers, the bumbling priest, have their own ideas about how to capitalize on God’s Finger. By contrast, and powered by honoring his own lost loves, Mano fights to resist this exploitation by teaching death to those who can’t afford to survive it. As Pie Time and Mano both grow irrevocably, Mano must make a decision about how he can best fit into his own life. With a large cast of unusual characters, each struggling with their own complex and tangled relationships to death, money, and love, Mammother is a fabulist's tale of how we hold on and how we let go in a rapidly growing world.
Poetry. Zachary schomburg has delivered his latest work from a dark place, where little machines repeat in a hollow voice, "this is only further proof of your badness." presented in a single narrative, THE BOOK OF JOSHUA is a sorry heart begged out of dreams, death & a horse's eye. It is an epic journey not only affirming that "there is a difference between sadness and suffering," but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. THE BOOK OF JOSHUA calls out in hunger and loneliness, "I didn't feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore."
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Poetry. In Zachary Schomburg's own words, PULVER MAAR "is a collection of poems written between 2014 and 2018. Some of the poems are long, and some of them are short." These are every bit the poems you've come to dream of, long for, and expect from Schomburg, where clouds fall in love and Bob the Buoy bobs in the center of the sea. They are playful but not all play; they carry a humanity and an acute awareness of what it is to try to make a life, whether you're a mountain or dust or just a human.
Poetry. Anthology. THE VOLTA BOOK OF POETS gathers together the work of 50 talented poets of disparate backgrounds and traditions, providing a constellation of the most exciting, innovative poetry evolving today. Named for the online poetics archive The Volta, THE VOLTA BOOK OF POETS navigates contrasting styles and forms to showcase poetry in its dissimilar pleasures, presenting difference as a means for inspiring a new way to think about poetry, and to inspire readership for the poetry communities and presses radiating out from the poets collected in this essential anthology, including Rosa Alcalá, Eric Baus, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Susan Briante, Sommer Browning, Julie Carr, Do...
Poetry. Expanding the palette of contemporary surrealism while harkening back to the stories and prayers at the origin of poetry, DESTRUCTION MYTH is a series of absurdist myths of creation and destruction that are at times both inventively silly and surprisingly emotionally direct. This book attempts the world again and again, only to find that even the most ridiculous of creations contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Fiction. Set in the dreamscape of the Kaats Kills, THE RUNAWAY NOTE is the fragmented story of two star-crossed lovers as they steal the devil's van, resurrect a dead boy, and re-experience their past lives. A pastiche of surreal romance, epistolary, and tall tale, the book takes the reader on an alternatingly whimsical and gruesome tour of youth, home, violence, time, and death. At once funny and menacing, inventive and human, THE RUNAWAY NOTE manages to find tenderness in the face of the inevitable end.
A brilliant debut collection that addresses human use of imagination as a means of displacement