Through heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, Rachel Zucker 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.
Price: $20.00
Pages: 272
Publisher: Wave Books
Imprint: Wave Books
Publication Date:
17 September 2019
Trim Size: 7.50 X 5.25 in
ISBN: 9781940696867
Format: Paperback
"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."— starred review,Publishers Weekly
Rachel Zucker is the author of many books, including SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019), The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014), and Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the co-author (with Arielle Greenberg) of the nonfiction title Home/birth: a poemic and co-editor (also with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Zucker currently teaches poetry at NYU. In 2016 she was a Bagley Wright Lecturer and wrote and delivered a series of talks on poetry, photography, confessionalism, motherhood, and the ethics of representing real people in art. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship in 2016, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center in 2018. Zucker lives in NYC with her husband and three sons.
Contents
Song of the Dark Room
It’s the World Committing Suicide Said One Mom
Seven Beds Six Cities Eight Weeks
Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits
I Can Barely Stand to Go to Weddings
Rough Waters
Death Project [Poem]
Let the World Unfurl One Word at a Time
Snapshot
Five Months Later I Finally Have Something to Say
SoundMachine
Need to Know
In the End
Confessional
Planet Hulk
After the New Couples Therapist
Sex with Famous Poet
The Feeling
Enough Is Enough
And Still I Speak of It
It Has Come to My Attention
The Moon Is in Her Caul Tonight
There Are Two Magics
We Cannot Make Them Happy Behave Passionate Patient Safe Sorry
Residency
