Books

The Poetics of Wrongness

In her first book of critical non-fiction, The Poetics of Wrongness, poet Rachel Zucker explores wrongness as a foundational orientation of opposition and provocation. Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their commitment to perseverance, these lecture-essays of protest and reckoning resist the notion of being wrong as a stopping point on the road to being right, and insist on wrongness as an analytical lens and way of reading, writing, and living that might create openness, connection, humility, and engagement. Expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016, Zucker’s deft dismantling of outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics feel prescient in their urgent destabilization of post-war thinking. In her four essay-lectures (and an appendix of selected, earlier prose), Zucker calls Sharon Olds, Bernadette Mayer, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Alice Notley, Natalie Diaz, Allen Ginsberg, Marina Abramović, and Audre Lorde—among others—into the conversation. This book marks a turning point in Zucker’s significant body of work, documenting her embrace of the multivocality her podcasting, and resisting the univocality of the lecture as a form of wrongness in and of itself.

SoundMachine

Rachel Zucker sweeps all the corners in this maximalist project of poems and prose, navigating love, loss, and personal and political despair. Through heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, she trains her relentless attention on marriage, motherhood, grief, the need to speak, depression, sex, and many other topics. Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay—and not limited by any of these categories—SoundMachine is a book written out of the persistent feeling that the human voice is both a meaningless sound and the only way we know we exist.

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Artfully layered . . . these pieces defy genre and interrogate the role of wife, mother, and artist as fixed identities. . . . Zucker renders even the simplest inquiries—such as "hasn’t anyone tried to stop this?"—resonant and profound in this restless and thoughtful book.
Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

The Pedestrians

Rachel Zucker returns to themes of motherhood, marriage, and the life of an artist in this double collection of poems. FABLES, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. THE PEDESTRIANS brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations.

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Zucker's name-naming, carping, merciless, and gloriously human body of work thus far suggests that any full account of being an individual has to register how specimen-like and interchangeable our lives often seem.
Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

Home/Birth

A lyric essay and total collaboration of extraordinary and shocking beauty, this hybrid text troubles the waters of genre, gender, motherhood, and the politics and poetics of birthing. An exacting and honest conversation between two of our most interesting writers and dedicated activists.

MOTHERs

"MOTHERs is a howling storm of a book. In this desperately digressive essay, the poet Rachel Zucker narrates her complicated path to becoming and not becoming her mother, the storyteller Diane Wolkstein. Zucker turns her intelligent eye outward and inward, including everything she knows about mothers, stories, poems, and consequence itself. In mythic terms, the essay is about a poet who doesn't want to turn into a storyteller. But as in all myths of avoidance, Zucker must eventually tell a terrifyingly inevitable story."—Sarah Manguso

Museum of Accidents

A brutally honest epic of domestic proportions, Museum of Accidents rends the terrorizing forces of modern existence from abstraction and places them directly in our laps. The anxieties and elations of motherhood and marriage unfold throughout poems of uncompromising courage, compassion and fever.

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By sharing experience through interrogating and dynamic language, Zucker shines light on how we can live honestly against the grain of expected feeling and attitude and how we might feel powerful and passionate in a time of terror and fear.
Academy of American Poets

The Bad Wife Handbook

Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

The Last Clear Narrative

In her second collection of poems, Rachel Zucker returns to a more autobiographical stance and writes about the particulars of marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood―experiences that radically surprised her. But this is no simple reportage. With candor, humor, and compassion, Zucker discovers a new poetic a landscape between story and fragment, a way of telling that is neither confessional nor intellectually detached. At the cliff-edge of narrative, a high place where language is the rope and falling the perception, Zucker's poems are unsentimental, true to the disjunctive experiences of loving, giving birth, raising a child, being lonely, being alive. A poetry of the body, of desire, about human frailty and strength, The Last Clear Narrative fills a void in the history of women writing about everyday experience and speaks to the nature of narrative itself.

Eating in the Underworld

In Rachel Zucker's re-imagining of the Greek myth, Persephone is a daughter struggling to become a woman. Unlike the classical portrait of a maiden kidnapped by a tyrant, Zucker's Persephone chooses to travel to the Underworld and assume her role as Hades' queen. Caught between worlds--light and dark, innocence and power, a mother's protection and a lover's appeal--Persephone describes the strangeness of the Underworld and the problems of transformation and transgression. The arrangement of Zucker's poems reflects Persephone's travels between the Underworld and the Surface. Both spare and lyrical, they are written as entries in Persephone's diary and as letters between Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. The language--strange, urgent, direct--is pulled and changed as Persephone journeys from one world to another revealing the struggle of unmaking and remaking the self.

If you’re having trouble purchasing any of these books or if you want to reach out to Rachel to pitch her an opportunity for her to do a poetry or lecture reading at your institution, please email rzucker.assistant@gmail.com!