- Home
- Wesleyan Poetry Series
- poetry
- The Last Clear Narrative
Radical, intimate poems about marriage and motherhood.
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 territory: 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.
A Kind of Catastrophe
Marriage Is
Registry
Wedding
Propriety
Property
Whitewash
At Night
Against Disappointment
Nights Drawn Together
In Your Version of Heaven I Am Younger
When I Knock on the Wall of the Next Stanza
The Moon Has a Reputation for Being Fickle
Trying to Reassure You (7 weeks)
Stars and Suns of My Body (10 Weeks)
Woman in the Mirror Says she Knows Me but I Will Not Let Her In (14 Weeks)
Being Marked or Obvious (18 weeks)
What the Living Look Like
Endnotes for What the Living Look Like
Rather a Structure or Process (21 Weeks)
The Twenty-Seventh Week
Thistle or Letter to My Husband (33 Weeks)
I Cannot Write Essays Will Not Be Famous
Sonnet Non-Volta
The Window Is One-Sided It Does Not Admit
The Rise in the Avenue
Between Here and This
Having a Baby Atom Bomb
Not Knowing Nijinsky or Diaghilev
What I Want You to See Is She When Not Here As in Now
The Argument Was Simple
The Desserts Will Make You Stupid with Happiness
One Night As I Was Driftin gOff to Sleep
Despite Reports Curious George Not a Monkey Has No Tail
Viviparity
Five Days on Fire Island or "Marriage Opens a Panel on a Lacquered Box"
My Friend Leaves His Wife and Two Young Children and See How I Abuse Him with My Title
Like Water but Less Steady
Here Happy is No part of Love
Notes and Dedications
Acknowledgments
About the Author
RACHEL ZUCKER is the author of Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan, 2003). Winner of the Barrow Street Award, the Strousse Prize, and the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, Zucker's poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including APR, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and The Best American Poetry 2001. She lives in New York City, and has more information at her web site, www.rachelzucker.net.
"In poem after stunning poem, The Last Clear Narrative is one woman telling the truth about her life, to recall Muriel Rukeyser, and in so doing, splitting the world back open."
~Cynthia Hogue, author of Flux
"Refreshingly straightforward in its emotional approach, The Last Clear Narrative combines experimental poetic techniques with personal material, often of great intensity, and with encounters with the quotidian world."
~Reginald Shepherd, author of Wrong and Otherhood
"In poem after stunning poem, The Last Clear Narrative is one woman telling the truth about her life, to recall Muriel Rukeyser, and in so doing, splitting the world back open."
~Cynthia Hogue, author of Flux
Related Books
