Contemporary Authors

• Mammother ( novel) Featherproof Books (Chicago, IL), 2017
• The Man Suit Black Ocean (Boston, MA), 2007
• Scary, No Scary Black Ocean (Boston, MA), 2009
• Fjords, Vol. 1 Black Ocean (Boston, MA), 2012
• The Book of Joshua Black Ocean (Boston, MA), 2014

1. Mammother : a novel LCCN 2017942658 Type of material Book Personal name Schomburg, Zachary, 1977- author. Main title Mammother : a novel / Zachary Schomburg. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Chicago, Illinois : Featherproof Books, [2017] ©2017 Description 328 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781943888108 (paperback) 1943888108 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PS3619.C4536 M35 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The book of Joshua LCCN 2014016669 Type of material Book Personal name Schomburg, Zachary, 1977- Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title The book of Joshua / by Zachary Schomburg. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Boston : Black Ocean, [2014] Description 118 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9781939568069 (hbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLS2015 055488 CALL NUMBER PS3619.C4536 A6 2014 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 3. Fjords LCCN 2011052351 Type of material Book Personal name Schomburg, Zachary, 1977- Main title Fjords / Zachary Schomburg. Published/Created Boston, MA : Black Ocean, c2012. Description 57 p. ; 20 cm. ISBN 9780984475254 (pbk.) 0984475257 (pbk.) Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1205/2011052351-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1205/2011052351-d.html Shelf Location FLS2013 004274 CALL NUMBER PS3619.C4536 F56 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 4. Scary, no scary LCCN 2009026214 Type of material Book Personal name Schomburg, Zachary, 1977- Main title Scary, no scary / Zachary Schomburg. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created Boston : Black Ocean, c2009. Description 84 p. ; 20 cm. ISBN 9780977770991 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1008/2009026214-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1008/2009026214-d.html Shelf Location FLS2013 006630 CALL NUMBER PS3619.C4536 S33 2009 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 5. The man suit LCCN 2006101284 Type of material Book Personal name Schomburg, Zachary, 1977- Main title The man suit / by Zachary Schomburg. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created Boston : Black Ocean, c2007. Description 105 p. ; 20 cm. ISBN 9780977770939 0977770931 Links Table of contents only http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip076/2006101284.html Contributor biographical information http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1008/2006101284-b.html Publisher description http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1008/2006101284-d.html Shelf Location FLS2013 006629 CALL NUMBER PS3619.C4536 M36 2007 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1)

• Zachary Schomburg Welog - http://lovelyarc.blogspot.com

  My blogs
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  Location Portland, OR, United States

• TIMBER - https://www.colorado.edu/timberjournal/2018/01/24/timber-interview-zachary-schomburg

  TIMBER Interview // Zachary Schomburg
  Published: Jan. 24, 2018
  [This is part of a series of interviews with past and current Timber contributors. In this installment, Poetry Editor Whitney Kerutis chats with Zachary Schomburg. –Ed.]

  Whitney Kerutis: Let’s first talk about you as a poet and you as a novelist. How do these roles interact with one another, open different parts of your artistic spirit, and possibly oppose one another?

  Zachary Schomburg: I’ve been thinking about poetry since I was twenty-years-old. I consider myself a poet and always have, but I’ve always wanted to write a novel. I thought that since I was a poet and I had written so many poems, I could write a novel too and that it would be like writing a poem but, it was a totally different activity and practice. You use a different part of the brain to write a poem than to write a novel. I never thought it would be easy, but I thought it’d be like putting one foot in front of other. It actually paralyzed me. I had to learn how to write all over again: in new ways, in a way the was constantly opening the narrative to new possibility, new logic, and answering the questions I had created. A poem is immediate and I can present questions that don’t need answering. In a novel, you have to clean up after yourself; poems you can make messes.

  I also draw. I’ve gotten really good at drawing lines and faces. I love paintings too and I often go to museums to fall in love with paintings. I know how to draw a face, but when I paint it’s that same sort of transition as poetry and fiction: to start over and learn from the beginning.

  It was exciting to see I had the same impulses, starting with those same tropes that come to me when I write poems, even though they are totally different things. I am still exploring how the reckoner tree in my book of poetry Fjords can be a character in Mammother too in order to make myself more comfortable. I don’t know how to put any other tree in a book.

  WK: The novel in some ways reminds me of one of your earlier collections of poetry, Fjords Vol. 1, in regards to the small world it creates. Can you talk more about these worlds and what they provide for you as the writer?

  ZS: Write what you know and write what you don’t know. I grow more excited about things I don’t know, but discover them by writing about things I do know about--things I know about because I’m a human. I want to explore these feelings such as pain, loss, loneliness, and love, but I’m not interested in how they manifest in my exact life. I want to play and imagine and be inspired. In a novel, I want to play with those feelings like I’m playing with dolls. Those feelings are the dolls’ feelings.

  WK: In conjunction with the previous question, I am interested particularly in the novel’s ability to work outside of time. We rarely get a clear indication of people’s ages, amount of time passed, and, in the last section of the book, we even see characters begin to resemble each other and replay the same events, etc.. Can you talk more about the mechanism of time or absence of in this novel?

  ZS: I don’t think there was a method for breaking down time, nor did I feel that time was a device within the novel that needed to be intentional. Part of it could be chalked up to being a first-time novelist and feeling overwhelmed with creating accurate mechanics for the novel. The physics of time within the novel were kind of an afterthought and basically lined up on their own (or didn’t). I kind of liked that though, that this world didn’t operate with perfect math, almost dreamlike. What I enjoyed about the characters living in Pie Time was that I never questioned if their ages made sense. Their relationships with each other, falling in and out of love or favor with one another, were far more interesting than how old they were, or if the physics of this tale were accurate. It was about 3/4ths of the way through the novel, thinking of the end, that I thought about how there were no cops, no doctors. I was dreaming this dream and didn’t think of the reality of people dying. In real life, there would be doctors and cops. But I’m writing out a dream, a fable, God and the church were enough like doctors and cops. After accounting for the fact that this wasn’t our world, I didn’t think too much about it. I laughed and said “In this world there are no cops or doctors.” I just said that. They aren’t that interesting to me. I think the whole point of dreaming is to distract from that. I didn’t care if their ages made sense, but I needed enough so it was readable. Mano is seemingly about 13 in parts one and two and by part three he is maybe 26. In my mind, in part three, he feels closer to death, tired, and with the remnants of a whole life literally weighing his giant body down. It’s that feeling that’s more important to me. But, yeah, he’s like 26, I don’t really know.\

  But that’s the fun of it, thinking of other people’s responses. The same questions apply to my poems. I’ve always bounced the question off others of whether I would continue to write if I knew nobody was going to read. I answer it in different ways for poems, I think I would still write poems but it’d be more lonely. I doubt I would write a novel if no one would read it because I want to have fun and say look at what I’ve done, I want to talk about it. The reader and writer get to dream the same dream. It’s like when we actually have a dream and we want to share it with others. I think of myself as one of the readers and wanting to entertain and surprise, make people laugh or weird them out. I try to impress myself. I try to push the wildness of a scene, make myself uncomfortable and make myself laugh to see what kind of reaction I can create. I don’t need to be comfortable in a book. I want to get so excited that I have to tell a friend about it. I thought (writing a novel) there was a good chance I could excite someone else too.

  WK: You have always seemed, to me, a writer who revels in the company and community of other writers. I can see a very long list of acknowledgements in the back of the book. Did this book feel like it was a community project or a gift for the other writers in your life?

  ZS: It makes it more playful to involve people and I like to be involved in other people’s work, to potentially influence their writing and ask questions. The process of writing is my favorite conversation to be a part of. If we are talking about art, something is going well; that we are in a place where this (art) is the most important thing to be talking about. If people are interested then that is a gift in itself.

  Several people who read Mammother gave me notes, some I didn’t know too well and others who were close friends, but honestly it was from the people I didn’t know very well, usually novelists, that I got the most from. Those people helped me figure out what a novel is.

  WK: The book seems to mimic a fable but doesn’t quite accept itself as one. How do you feel the book operates within other traditions?

  ZS: I wasn’t too deliberate about writing in any genre, but I was influenced by the books I was reading and learned some of their tricks. Some of those tricks I learned were from people who do write fable-like books, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. That book is similar to mine in that many characters that have different back stories but interact with each other in one space. Shirley Jackson too, so many of her short stories are like mine: dark, strange, and magical. I am influenced by these authors and aspire to write like them.

  WK: Perhaps one of the more ambitious goals of the text is the amount of characters we encounter. How did you manage to curate and sustain each character?

  ZS: I didn’t intend to write a book with so many characters, but as problems were being created throughout the novel, I had to create new characters to address those problems. Pepe had to have a backstory, so I had to invent his dad and if his dad was going to be there, I had to invent his mom. But Pepe needs parents to have motivation about keeping his love for Mano a secret. As those problems kept growing and characters followed, I made a character map, tying little connections and color-coding people of the corporation versus Mano’s side. When I had that I could see what characters existed and flowed in and out of one another. It’s really hard to write a novel with so many people. In a poem, you can leave them behind.

  Mammother Character Map - Zachary Schomburg

  (Image from Zachary Schomburg’s Twitter account, @zschomburg)

  WK: This novel has some absolutely breathtaking poetic moments in it. I’m curious, moving into the bigger picture, how you feel about the ability for genres to mingle with one another and where you see the future of genres headed?

  ZS: I don’t know if I am capable of saying where we are moving, but it’s interesting to observe the long history of amazing authors that are writing works considered a hybrid of poetry and prose, such as Susan Howe, Bernadette Mayer, and Anne Carson. I don’t know how to classify these pieces, but it is fascinating to think beyond genre and simply being an artist and consider these complicated thoughts we sit with. I hadn’t written a novel, so I was really interested in doing so. I wanted to learn how to write a traditional novel, traditionally in the sense of style, but experimental in how it functioned, such as the narrative, character development, and setting. Those were my initial goals for Mammother, and it evolved itself in further ways I didn’t anticipate, but that’s what was wonderful about the whole experience. I was interested in novel writing in the way that Marquez, Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison wrote their novels, and still am. I feel like reading novels is just the same, as important, as creative, as writing one. Currently, I'm reading the Diary of Anne Frank for the first time, with my partner, one entry per night before bed. Also, I've been juggling The Story of My Life by Helen Keller and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates for the last two weeks. I've recently finished a couple of mid-century noirs by Dorothy Hughes---In a Lonely Place and The Expendable Man--which taught me a lot about third person omniscient storytelling, and how to keep the page turning fast around one character. And Patrick DeWitt's Sisters Brothers, which is so good. Next up, I got Layli Long Soldier, Bill Knott, Cortazar, Ishiguro, and some re-reads of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Flannery O'Connor's Wiseblood on the docket. I rarely re-read novels, but I want to change that. But first, I will read Amos Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard. I know nothing about it right now, but my friend, Brandon, just recommended it to me a few minutes ago. I take his recommendations seriously. So, that's next up. It'll probably change everything.

  [You can purchase Zachary Schomburg's latest work, Mammother, on the Featherproof Books website. You can read more of Schomburg's poetry and learn more about him here.)

• Poetry Foundation Website - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/zachary-schomburg

  Zachary Schomburg
  b. 1977
  Poet and translator Zachary Schomburg was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Iowa. He earned a BA from the College of the Ozarks and a PhD in creative writing-poetry from the University of Nebraska. His books of poetry include The Man Suit (2007), Scary, No Scary (2009), and Fjords vol 1 (2012). He has said of his work, which is known for its absurd, tender humor, “Mostly I want my poems to generate their own energy through confusion. I want my poems to confuse the reader. Not a confusion in a cognitive or narrative sense, but in an emotional sense.” Schomburg co-edits Octopus Books and lives in Portland, Oregon.

• From Publisher -

  Zachary Schomburg is the father of 35 children, none of which are visible. They are very tiny and live in his hair. They are the ones who wrote these three books: The Man Suit (Black Ocean, 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean, 2009), and FJORDS vol. I (Black Ocean, 2012) . Zachary Schomburg is a girl. Zachary Schomburg is a refrigerator. Zachary Schomburg is a talking wolf and she co-edits Octopus Magazine andOctopus Books while living in Portland, OR.

• Zachary Schomburg Website - http://www.zacharyschomburg.net/

  Zachary Schomburg is a poet, novelist, illustrator, teacher, and the publisher and editor of Octopus Books. He lives in Portland, OR.

  Here is a bit more at The Poetry Foundation.

  Email me at zacharyschomburg at gmail dot com

  Twitter: @zschomburg

• Eleven PDX - http://elevenpdx.com/community/literary-arts/portland-writer-zachary-schomburg

  PORTLAND WRITER ZACHARY SCHOMBURG Scott McHale on November 6, 2017

  Photo by Brandi Katherine Herrera

  Obsessing over the word “Mammother,” which he made up, Zachary Schomburg set out on the ambitious journey of writing his first novel born out of that word. In short, a “Mammother” is someone who hunts for nonexistent mammoths. In a room in the back of Mother Foucault’s bookshop, he wrote the first paragraph of Mammother (Featherproof Books) and wrote the rest in a chateau deep in the French countryside where it became a full length novel. Instead of being driven by plot, Schomburg creates his world out of a fascinating set of characters surrounding Mano Medium, who seems to come from either a children’s tale or a Beckett novel.

  The interaction with each other is what fleshes out the characters in Mammother. They love each other, and are sometimes severely wounded by each other. Mano is a devoted son who brings beer and cigarettes from the factory where he works to his mother who spends all of her days soaking in the bathtub until she dies suddenly from God’s Finger, the plague that has set the town into a frenzy. Then a close friend is also struck down by the plague. This is a major tuning point for Mano, and he transforms both mentally and physically into something completely different.

  Like Beckett, or Donald Barthelme (who Schomburg credits as an influence), the setting and plot are in the secondary and the characters are not what you would see in a traditional novel. They exist like the ancillary characters in a dream. They represent an idea, or an emotion or display some kind of profoundly human quality or flaw. Zachary Schomburg wrote his first novel with a poet’s eye and keen attention to language and detail. He poignantly demonstrates this in the end of chapter two as the town’s priest tries to create a miracle by nailing a cross into the air. His feet slipped. The sheep were baaaing in the distance. Little yellow flowers blossomed all over the valley. Instead of just showing an awful death scene, Schomburg zooms out to let the reader see the world continuing on, naturally. Like many of the chapters in Mammother, the last line is finely punctuated and leads the reader to the next chapter by leaving them with a powerfully lasting image.

  As a teacher, Schomburg is always challenging himself to take on new forms of literature and investigating the world through poetry, and now prose. He has been a mainstay in the literary community seemingly since arrived in Portland almost a decade ago. I met him after he read from his new novel at Ford Food and Drink. As we sipped on some coffee, he pulled an unbound book cover from a book cover for C.D. Wright’s book, 40 Watts. He told me that he and some new friends had gotten together one night and made that book cover. That soon evolved into Octopus Books, a small press that he runs with fellow poets Hajara Quinn and Mathias Svalina. Just recently, he as started conducting community workshops of his own at Outlet PDX, where he provides a laid back atmosphere for aspiring writers to learn the crafts of poetry and prose.

  11: Let’s talk about this book. What is a Mammother?

  ZS: It’s just a made up word. The whole story started with the word, Mammother. I probably picked that word up six years ago. I just started telling this story around that concept to myself until I had the chance to just write it out, which was three years ago now. It’s used in a couple of ways in the book. And I think as a poet, I’m so interested in words and language and how the letters fit together and all the ways that the word can work, and how it can be broken down. It’s just a perfect word for the book. And I think because it started with that, the story was born out of the word. So Mammother is a minor character in the book but is really a major part which propels everything forward. Mano’s father, who he doesn’t know, and is never in the book, is a Mammother and is talked about in one or maybe two scenes as this person who hunts mammoths. He doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive, and the mother is kind of incapable of talking about it. If he’s alive, he’s hunting mammoths somewhere. And mammoths don’t exist in this world. So he’s talked about as someone who wants to find mammoths so he’s going to hunt them even though he knows they don’t exist. Because that’s what great hunters would do. There’s a few moments where Mano is confronted with similar ideas about loving things that don’t exist and being disappointed by them.

  11: This book addresses religion in an interesting way, can you tell us about that?

  ZS: In the book, there’s a church and a corporation, and Mano is one of the few people in town who doesn’t go to church, and he kind of positions himself against the church who aligns itself with this corporation called XO. The church in the book is a real joke. Father Mothers is this real kind of a joke of a character. He’s an alcoholic and he just gets everything wrong. The church is something Mano has positioned himself away from because they are really concerned that everyone is dying from this plague, so they want to make money off of that. The church is becoming more successful because the more that people die, the more people show up to the church.

  11: Can you also talk about the other meaning of mammoth in this book? How something becomes mammoth?

  ZS: So Mano loses the only two people he loves. As that happens, he decides that he’s not going to love people anymore, because it’s too hard. He decides that he is going to love the things that people leave behind in their death holes, because things can’t die on you. He starts collecting all the things, because no one else wants them. If your loved one dies and there’s a toaster inside of them, then they do not want the toaster, it just reminds them of their grief. So he sees it as something that he can collect and love. His service, in a way, is to collect all of those things. But the only way that a thing will die on you is if you lose it. So he decides that he is not going to set any of it down, so he carries it. As one person dies a day, more or less, he picks up a thing and he never sets it down, so he gets bigger and bigger–mammother and mammother.

  11: You have several scenes that concentrate on a character simply moving from one place to another. Can you explain that? Is this breaking the third wall?

  ZS: I think there are these things in storytelling that you can take for granted because the most important thing is to move the plot forward and develop the character. We can assume that these tiny things are true. I think like Beckett, and other writers like Amy Bender or Lidia Davis can do a really good job at taking those things that you would otherwise take for granted and making the story about them in a way. In the case of Mammother, for example, it can’t just be assumed that a character can get from here to there. It can be assumed if you just want plot, but I like the idea of making the reader focus on the thing that you would take for granted and make that the plot, make that the story. You’re not breaking the third wall, but you’re asking the reader to to pay attention to the art of the writing, and the fun the writer is having.

  11: This is your first novel, can you tell me about this as opposed to writing your poetry? How do you apply that same visual nature to your prose?

  ZS: They are so different from each other. And that was what was hard for me to get over at first. I didn’t know what I was doing because the impulse in a poem for me is when I start a line, or start a narrative, the impulse is to think immediately, “How do I get out of this?” now that I started this little image or have this line. The next thought is literally, “How am I going to wrap this up? And how am I going to get there?” In a novel, I drive myself crazy because I’m not developing anything, I’m just trying to get out of it. Which is way too much information to hold in any one sitting, instead of just focusing on a scene or whatever. So I think once I was able to get out of that I think I still have an advantage because I’m still really interested in syntax, in the lyric, in wild images. More so than just developing this realistic narrative or these realistic characters. To get interested in working on a real sentence. I’m interested in last lines and first lines as a poet. I think it was important to me to see how each scene starts and definitely what’s the last line of each scene to try to really end on an idea or an image.

  11: Can you explain a bit about your story structure? There have been some comparisons made to Patrick deWitt.

  ZS: They’re very different worlds, but the structure is kind of similar. I wrote this draft before I read Patrick deWitt’s books. They weren’t influenced by his stuff as much as Marquez’s stuff, or Shirley Jackson , or Toni Morrison. So those three were the ones I was reading to structure the book. I think the thing that all of those people do is that they have their characters in the town together, bouncing off of each other. They are not static characters but the setting is static. They say, here’s the town and all of the parts of the town. Then all of the plot builds as the town grows and how the people grow and change and hate and love each other. So I’m looking at Song of Soloman and Sula and Hundred years of Solitude. Now I am working on another novel that is going to try to do something like what Patrick deWitt does. He has a character that is always moving forward through different towns, basically. It’s still a journey but every scene is like now I’m meeting this person, and now this thing is happening. He’s always kind of moving forward. That’s so compelling to me, that’s what I love, and for some reason it’s very hard for me to do and it’s so simple.

  Me: So you went directlly from poetry to long form prose. Have you ever considered writing short stories?

  ZS: I always wanted to be a novelist, or have written a novel. That sounds more interesting and romantic and I feel more proud of that than writing a story. I’m interested in the challenge of telling a story over a duration. From now, I think I’m interested in writing another novel, or maybe in the structure of a novella than I am of short stories. And I don’t know why. I think I’m interested in the idea of really short form or really long form. In the same way that with any music that I listen to for example, I want to listen to the most extreme version of that music. If I’m interested in metal, immediately I go what is the most metal? Or if I’m interested in minimalist music, I’m interested in what’s the quietest, what’s the most sparse. I think I’m interested, if I’m talking about storytelling, how can I do this in the most sparse way, or the most big way. So short stories for me are not that interesting right now, but maybe it will be.

  11: What advice would you have for an aspiring writer or poet?

  ZS: The best advice I can give if you have to simplify it all down is to relax. None of what you’re writing is precious. Nobody cares, in a way. If you think you’re going to write the most amazing stuff that is going to change the world then you’re really putting too much pressure on yourself. It’s a game, and it’s fun. And I think if you’re writing poems, for example, with the same level of entertainment as say, completing a crossword puzzle, you might have these little moments of pride, but you might start writing things that are pretty beautiful because they’re not precious. The pressure is off. You’re just entertaining yourself. But if you have this connection to your writing that feels like a real spark is there, and you’ve learned something about yourself and the world because you’ve made this little piece of art, then the world is because of that–as a result, not as an intention. As a result, the world is a little better because you’re now in it and you’ve learned something about making art.

  -Scott McHale

• Willamette Week - http://www.wweek.com/arts/2017/09/05/in-mammother-gods-finger-pokes-murderous-holes-through-residents-of-a-town-called-pie-time/

  In “Mammother,” God’s Finger Pokes Murderous Holes Through Residents of A Town Called Pie Time
  The first novel by Portland poet Zachary Schomburg is as strange and twisty as its origin story. (Mammother)
  By Matthew Korfhage | Published September 6, 2017 Updated September 6, 2017
  Zachary Schomburg will insist, if you ask, that his novel is "very traditional."

  But it's a strange tradition, if so. Mammother (Featherproof Books, 345 pages, $17.95) is at once a surrealist comedy about death and a deeply human tragedy about love, set in a town called Pie Time whose factory makes nothing but beer and cigarettes.

  Its people are beset by a terrible plague: Without warning, God's Finger descends from the sky to leave murderous holes in Pie Timers' chests. In each corpse, a little memento is left behind—a telephone, say, or a radio.

  "Your hearts are too small," says the radio left behind in the "death hole" of the town's former preacher, whose name is Father Mothers.

  Schomburg, a Nebraska-raised Portlander prone to rumpled sweaters, has many stories for how the novel came to exist. The simplest is that he got a residency in France in 2015 that allowed him to do nothing but write. Schomburg has published four books of poetry in the past decade, but novels were foreign to him—not only in format but also because of their brute length.

  "Maybe poetry is the thing I've studied, but it's also something I could do in a single sitting," Schomburg tells WW. "You can do it in an evening, put it out, put it away. A novel is a lot of work."

  The seed for Mammother was planted in Portland five years ago, however, while waiting for a Red Fang show to start.

  "I was writing a poem with a friend," says Schomburg. "The very first word was 'mammother.' I put the m down, she put the a down. We got 'mammoth.' And then she wrote e, which was frustrating because Mammoth would have been a great title."

  So he finished the word by writing "mammother." Schomburg's obsession with this word formed the eventual structure of the novel—and also the story of its main character, Mano Medium.

  "After that moment, I kept thinking about that word—it started an entire plot, mostly to think about it as a noun: What does a mammother do? He hunts mammoths. But also it means to get larger and larger."

  Mano Medium is the hero of the book, if there is one. After taking over the roles of both barber and butcher, he also becomes a repository for the Pie Time dead, holding each of the items found in their death holes. He also holds "Death Lessons" for the town's children, letting them play with animals he eventually butchers in front of them.

  Schomburg wrote the novel's first paragraph at Mother Foucault's Bookshop on Southeast Morrison Street, where he sat at a typewriter and tapped out what would become the book's first sentence: "If you felt ready to die, wanted death bad enough and had little enough to live for, The Reckoner would grant your wish and fall on you."

  For a time, the first paragraph was all he had. An attempt at a graphic novel with artist Gregor Holtz also ran aground. The only surviving image is of a monster luridly eating a woman from the middle of her legs up.

  Mammother can read as if an alien had learned the concept of a novel from outer space, and set about writing one. To learn the novel's form, Schomburg solicited advice from local novelist Patrick deWitt—whose Undermajordomo Minor, another fable without a moral, is a sort of spiritual cousin to Mammother—and steeped himself in the magical narratives of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Marquez, and the cruelties of Shirley Jackson.

  As in a García Marquez village, the cast of characters surrounding Mano is limitlessly vast. But if the book is best represented by any one of its parts, it is perhaps the epic journey of Enid Pine, who travels so slowly in her monthslong journey down a garden path to Mano's house that she's treated as furniture.

  Schomburg says he wanted to create a form of storytelling that's the opposite of A Game of Thrones, in which long journeys are always skipped over. In what might be a metaphor for creation itself, Pine finally gives painful birth to the tusks of a mammoth that did not yet exist—a mammoth she then triumphantly rides. As Mano's mother once said of the mammoth hunter she loved, "Only a great hunter can find something that doesn't exist."

  The journey is long and strange, and it follows a path that can at times be difficult to see. But in the end, there are wonders. Mammothing is, perhaps, the wholehearted work of the book. "When Enid finally gets there and these tusks are pulled out of her vagina," Schomburg says, "it's pretty satisfying."

• Omaha World-Herald - http://www.omaha.com/living/omahan-doesn-t-expect-to-make-much-money-selling-vinyls/article_75b75d6b-41a9-527d-89d0-d913b1b48a06.html

  Omahan's vinyl-record poetry business is a labor of love, obviously
  By Micah Mertes / / World-Herald staff writer Mar 22, 2017 0
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  Poetry and business aren’t two words you’d expect to be used in the same sentence. Poetry, business and vinyl records are an even more unlikely assembly of words.

  But Jeff Alessandrelli — a 33-year-old Omahan and owner of the spoken-word-poetry vinyl record press Fonograf Editions — knew when he launched this endeavor last year that it wasn’t going to make much, if any, money. The hope is for Fonograf Editions to make just enough to be self-sustaining: the last record paying for the next. It’s not there yet, and it might never be.

  “More so than any other art form, especially written art forms, there’s no money in poetry,” Alessandrelli said. “There’s especially no money in vinyl records of poets reading their work. At the same time, it’s something I believe in and enjoy doing. It would be great if we made money. I don’t foresee that happening, and if we don’t I’m still going to try to make it work.”

  The idea for Fonograf Editions came to fruition recently, when Alessandrelli received some money after a death in the family and used it to get the record label off the ground. Shortly after launching the business, he moved from Portland, Oregon, to Omaha. He teaches English at Peru State College in Peru, Nebraska. This was his return to the state — he attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln after growing up in Reno, Nevada.

  Fonograf Editions is an arm (or tentacle, rather) of Octopus Books, a Portland-based poetry press. Octopus’ founding editor is Zach Schomburg, 39, born in Omaha and raised in Council Bluffs, where he went to Lewis Central High School.

  So while Alessandrelli is a former Portlandian living in Omaha, Schomburg is a former Omahan living in Portland.

  Both entrepreneurs/poets make their living teaching. Both got doctoral degrees in creative writing from UNL, though not at the same time.

  They knew of each other while in Lincoln but didn’t really meet until they were both living in the Pacific Northwest. There are more poets in Portland than Lincoln but still not that many. They were bound to connect.

  They became friends, and one night over drinks they came up with the idea for a poetry-only vinyl press. There were no PowerPoint proposals or five-year projected growth plans. Just two sometime Nebraskans starting something that mattered to them.

  Alessandrelli had long been a poet and a collector of vinyl. And a collector of spoken-word poetry records on vinyl — which used to be a thing.

  One of the pioneers of the spoken-word record industry was Caedmon Records. That company’s first release was a collection of poems written and read by Dylan Thomas. Subsequent Caedmon releases included performances by writers such as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein and many more. NPR called the company’s idea the catalyst for today’s audiobook industry.

  Alessandrelli has many of those records. “You don’t put on a poetry album every single day like you do with your favorite band,” he said, “but it’s something I do go back to.”

  Poets Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein are among his favorites. “And it’s been interesting to hear their voices,” he said, “the voice of somebody who’s been dead for a long time. You know, they’re alive in the room.”

  So far, Fonograf Editions has produced two records: “Aloha/irish trees,” a collection of poems written and read by Eileen Myles, and “Conflation,” a collection written and read by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout. Two more records are on the way.

  Armantrout said Alessandrelli called her out of the blue. “He asked if I would be interested in making a record,” she said. “That was a question I never imagined I’d be asked.”

  She thought it sounded like fun. She doesn’t like hearing her own voice on record, but she said there’s a value to hearing recorded poetry that neither the page nor a live performance can offer.

  “When you hear a poem read,” Armantrout said, “you may be able to catch nuances of tone that you’d miss if you were reading to yourself. On the other hand, when you go to a live reading, the lines go by too quickly. If you stop to think about something you heard, you miss what’s coming next. A recording like this gives you the best of both. It’s repeatable like a printed poem, and it also allows you to hear the poet’s pacing and tonality.”

  Armantrout herself hasn’t owned a record player since “the advent of the 8-track tape,” but she said she’s glad to see vinyl making a comeback.

  “I think there’s a growing affection for physical objects, things not made of ones and zeros,” she said.

  Vinyl records have been the one physical music format seeing an uptick in popularity. In 2015, vinyl sales hit a 28-year high. Forbes reported that vinyl sales will near $1 billion in 2017, moving 40 million units.

  Fonograf Editions’ records are made at Cascade Record Pressing, which is itself a fairly new company riding the wave of the vinyl revival. It was launched just outside Portland in the summer of 2015 and is the first large-production record pressing plant in the Pacific Northwest.

  Each Fonograf record, from the recording to the mastering to the pressing, takes about three months to make.

  Even with its resurgence, vinyl is a niche of the music industry. Which makes spoken-word poetry records a niche of a niche.

  “In terms of a business model, it’s absolutely terrible,” Schomburg said with a laugh. “To have the idea to say ‘I know what we could sell. We could sell poetry, and we’ll make it even harder by putting it on records.’ ”

  But at the same time, that’s what he loves about the idea.

  “It’s the thing with the poetry press, too,” Schomburg said. “The idea has never been to have a business so much as it is to make the thing we love and share it. For me, that’s one of the reasons I love poetry so much: There’s really no chance that it will sell. The people who are doing it, you know they love poetry because there’s no other reason to do it.”

  Alessandrelli and Schomburg know it’s quixotic: championing an ever-dwindling art form that many people just don’t get.

  “I mean, there’s a reason why poetry doesn’t have nearly the same cultural cachet as film or TV or all of these things,” Alessandrelli said. “The biggest hangup people have with poetry is that you approach it as a puzzle.”

  But you can take poetry at face value, too, he said. You don’t have to think of it as a homework assignment. Poetry isn’t just poems. Poetry can be a quality that something else (a movie, a novel, a Tweet) embodies.

  “We live in a world based on language,” he said. “Things that have a rhythm and a euphonic quality, they’re poetry. Maybe people don’t really read poetry that much. But I do think the way words meld with other words is important. It matters.”

  He smiled.

  “That’s not going to sell these records. That’s just what I believe.”

  micah.mertes@owh.com, 402-444-3182, twitter.com/micahmertes

Schomburg, Zachary: MAMMOTHER
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Schomburg, Zachary MAMMOTHER Featherproof (Adult Fiction) $17.95 9, 26 ISBN: 978-1-943888-10-8

A young man tries to find his purpose in life--despite living in a bizarre surrealist landscape.Poet Schomburg (The Book of Joshua, 2014, etc.) brings his unique voice to a first novel that may delight literary experimentalists but confound everyone else. This fabulist fable is set in the town of Pie Time, a village that seems to contain a factory that makes only cigarettes and beer, a church, an inn, a bar, and a few shops. The book's protagonist is Mano Medium, a factory worker who is suddenly thrust into the dual roles of barber and butcher. This Byzantine composition is also populated by more than 50 characters, cataloged in a list at the front of the book. They include a few distinct personalities like Sisi Medium, Mano's mother; his friend Pepe Let; and Enid Pine, a girl Mano fancies, but most characters are simply avatars for their professions--The Businessman, The Postman, etc. The narrative's driving conflict is a plague called "God's Finger," which not only kills, but also leaves a hole in its victim's body with a random consumer product stuck in it. Schomburg fills his fable with plenty of grotesque imagery, including a tide of bodies floating down the river to a nearby community, where they've been assembled into a horrifying pyramid. Along the way, Mano becomes a sort of curator of the death objects and teaches his neighbors to be accepting of death itself. But the character of the town changes dramatically again with the arrival of XO, a mysterious corporation that starts systematically replacing the local institutions with its own brands. By the time Enid rides triumphantly out of town on her mammoth, traditional readers wouldn't be mistaken in thinking, "What the hell did I just read?" A fancifully written experiment that can't decide whether it wants to be an absurdist meditation on the human condition or a satire of consumer culture.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Schomburg, Zachary: MAMMOTHER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572809/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ea1598aa. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572809

Fjords, Vol. 1
Publishers Weekly. 259.13 (Mar. 26, 2012): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Fjords, Vol. 1

Zachary Schomburg. Black Ocean (SPD, dist.) $14.95 trade paper (72p) ISBN 978-0-9844752-5-4

It's said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, something Schomburg understands. In his third collection, "the world is always as it is, and always as it seems." Narrative without losing lyrical beauty, witty without losing gravity, the poems--though fiercely contemporary--still uphold the priorities to delight CI am working in the ticket booth of the movie theater when you come in and take off my pants") and to instruct ("Nothing is anyone's fault, which is something we must remember. The world is just a bag of seeds and there is nowhere for the seeds to be planted"). Capping off the book is an index (including classic themes--"Truth," "Beauty," "Death," "Birth"--along with some new ones--"Airplanes, burning"), which suggests these poems should be reread, even referenced--as if this book is a manual for transcending "wild meaninglessness." "Falling in love with the death thought is a way of never really dying," Schomburg writes. "You let an idea hold you in its real arms." These are wildly imagined poems to fall in love with and reread. (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fjords, Vol. 1." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2012, p. 56. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A284552425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6e37b75f. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A284552425

The Man Suit
Publishers Weekly. 253.16 (Apr. 16, 2007): p33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Man Suit ZACHARY SCHOMBURG, Black Ocean (SPD, dist.), $12.95 (112p) ISBN 978-0-9777709-3-9

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. In "Postcard from the Arctic Ocean" the speaker can "make smoke signals/ by burning/ these postcards/ by the handful." With similarly flippant but persistent gestures, Schomburg pushes at the boundaries of logic. He asks for a willing suspension of disbelief and of order. Non sequitur and clever opposition govern this world: a homicidal monster-cum-TV celebrity is fired in favor of a "gorilla dressed in people clothes"; in "I'm Not Carlos," "tree machines" dial up the poem's speaker, calling him Carlos and demanding he hand over "the Man Suit." A poem called "I've Since Folded This Poem into an Airplane" admits Schomburg's comfort with the self-conscious and reflexive in poetry. If a few of these poems are slight, the best of them imbue whimsy with high emotional stakes, suggesting this collection's casualness has been carefully wrought. Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around. (Apr.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Man Suit." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2007, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A162362079/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=475dc72e. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A162362079

"Schomburg, Zachary: MAMMOTHER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572809/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ea1598aa. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018. "Fjords, Vol. 1." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2012, p. 56. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A284552425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6e37b75f. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018. "The Man Suit." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2007, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A162362079/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=475dc72e. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.

• Queen Mob's Tea House
  http://queenmobs.com/2017/09/12-5-review-zachary-schomburgs-mammother/
  Word count: 373

  12.5 REVIEW OF ZACHARY SCHOMBURG’S THE MAMMOTHER

  8TH SEP 2017 IN REVIEWS
  TAGS: 12.5 REVIEW, JUDSON HAMILTON

  BY JUDSON HAMILTON
  0 COMMENTS
  It is impossible for me to sum up this book. I’ll have to sneak up on it from behind it instead. But know this it shines like a gilded symbolist triumph in the desert of the real.
  It’s high time for a Pie Time.
  Mano thought that death wasn’t a thing to fight, but a thing to be ready for. He thought that if we could all just be ready for it, it could be beautiful. (page 125).
  Like the best of dreams, a lot of the book’s uncanny goings-on are left unexplained. You’re gonna have to embrace the inexplicable with this one.
  The characters in this book have some fantastic names. Here is a sample: Inez Roar and her daughter Zuzu Roar, Nana Pine, Pepe Let and his mother Mitzi Let and the best-named priest in all of literature – Father Mothers.
  Schomburg has a style that turns Hemingway on his head. By the looks of them, these are simple sentences. And yet they are anything but – there is a depth to them – like a pure bell being rung.
  As culinary accompaniment I’m gonna recommend a Steak and Ale Pie.
  The War on Death, Mano thought, was not a war at all, but a milking. It was a way to milk death for what it was worth, instead of loving it for what it had to be. (page 158).
  Really at the heart of the book is how small-town life (with its close knit social relations and familiarity with death) becomes the life of the city (where those relations are far and few between and death is held at arm’s length).
  How can you not like a book with a river called the Cure and a town called Nun’s Hat in it?
  This book is wonderfully self-contained. It reminded me of several films but this one in particular.
  Why not get to know Mr. Schomburg better by visiting his web page? (Psst – He also writes poems).
  12.5 Buy

• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2017/11/08/reviews/devin-kelly/mammother-zachary-schomburg/
  Word count: 2180

  November 8, 2017
  Mammother – Zachary Schomburg
  by Devin Kelly

  Mammother cover[Featherproof Books; 2017]

  TEN FRAGMENTS ON MAMMOTHER

  More poets should write novels. That’s what I’m thinking after reading Zachary Schomburg’s Mammother. Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s that the definition of a poet has more to do with a way of seeing than whatever form the writing that follows such seeing takes. I’ve been thinking of this lately, perhaps because it is one of the great pastimes of the poet to discuss the worth of the poet. But I think the aim of the poet is tied to the aim of the artist: to remember, to tell, and in such telling, to reinvent. As Hilton Als writes: “Artists remember the world as it is, first, because you have to know what it is you’re reinventing.” It’s clear, then, that Schomburg remembers well. And out of such remembrance, he has crafted out of his novel a space of fabulist, sentiment-rich time. Like Marquez’s best work, Mammother takes its reader down the soil-rich lineage of communal mythology. Like Shane Jones’ beautiful and tender Lightboxes, Mammother narrows its focus to one place, one town, and the ways in which small gatherings of people reacting to change reflect how all of us together react to the problems of time. But to compare such a novel to other lessons in fabulism is to deny that odd things happen in all places. At some point in your life, something will fall in front of your feet that you did not expect. There’s a challenge that Mammother offers the reader: to believe, simply, in what you are about to read, and then to risk reading it.
  I’m writing this while on a bus to Boston. Through the process of reading Mammother, I’ve attended one funeral – for my friend’s father – and am now on my way to visit my girlfriend’s aunt, who is in hospice care. I’ve never met her. When Meg received the news of her aunt’s potential passing, she left New York almost immediately. I offered to come up the next day for support and was taken aback when Meg said that she’d like me to meet her aunt, who, she said, always wanted to meet me. So here I am, somewhere in Connecticut, where the sky forever seems like winter, racing the timespan of a life to meet that same life at its end. I don’t know how we do this, or why. These are difficult questions. Outside my window, birds alight into the dark green mass of trees before ascending, sometimes all at once, a great dark swirl, sometimes just one, lonely or free or both.
  Mammother tells the story of a town, Pie Time, and a person, Mano Medium. The town is struck by a plague of sorts. People die, leaving behind a hole in their chest and a thing – an object, a token – placed within the hole. There is no pattern. The town has people named after their professions: The Barber, The Butcher, The Shoveler, and more. More people die. They each leave a thing. Mano grows up wearing dresses, working at a cigarette factory. He later gets a haircut and falls in love with a boy. More people die. Mano becomes a barber. Mano begins to gather all the things that the dead leave behind. He gives lessons about death to others. A widow, Inez, falls in love with him. As does a girl, Enid. Mano loves the boy more. There is a black square in his barbershop that he can move into, a new world or the same. There is a tree in a forest that people used to go to in order to be killed, to die. There is a river, The Cure, upon which the bodies are floated down when they are dead. Mano becomes bigger and bigger as he gathers the things that are left behind or given to him. There is so much and so much death. The heart of the novel thumps like a great red orb pulsing upward from the other side of the horizon as you read.
  On buses, I’m always struck by the simple fact of this box filled with people hurtling toward a fixed point while remaining still inside. Here, I am one person among many going to the same destination for, I assume, different reasons. And for a short time, we can get up within this vessel and walk around, go to the bathroom, speak or not. I never feel like I make the most of the fewer-and-far-between moments of stillness this life affords me. Schomburg has a poem in an old issue of DIAGRAM where he writes, “I told you . . . I was in fact an island and that I couldn’t join anyone anywhere.” Tell me this shouldn’t be printed underneath each window of each Greyhound hurtling down the highway.
  What is it about things, Schomburg seems to ask in Mammother. What is it about what we gather for ourselves? What is it about what we leave behind? What is it about what we refuse to let go? What is it about letting go? Does it scare us? Does it make us fear our life? Our death? Always there is that hum of Rilke from his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” that warning, that confession and declaration: “You must change your life.”
  The bus rolls forward along 84, and we pass, in some order, a large abandoned cinema, a Burlington Coat Factory, a Sam’s Club, and an unmarked low-rise building sprawling out among the vastness of unfilled parking spaces. There is so much here, used and unused, each a kind of life, each its own kind of death. I’m afraid I don’t know how to say any more than that. In my life, I have gathered up so much. I sleep, surrounded by books and miscellany, in a room surrounded by other rooms. I save old letters. I have two big garbage bags of clothes I have yet to give away, for no reason other than the notion that there is always another day. Some nights I want to crawl through the black square that is my window and find myself surrounded by trees I cannot name, swimming in water that will never drown me, touching the hair atop another’s arm.
  At one point, Schomburg writes of Mano, “He knew his life would change if he opened the door, and he didn’t want his life to change.” At one point, Mano describes love as “a deep ache . . . Like you miss them even when you’re with them.” How can I fault a novel that searches deep enough to say such things? Why, too, do I think so much of fault? There is the tired hum in the back of my head about a line being earned or believable, but what is more deeply earned than feeling, than ache? I believe less these days in the possibility of good in art, or in any of our various abilities to sort out the goodness like gifts. I choose, more so, to believe in delight and violence and death and pulse, to believe in what skews what I know. I don’t know if I crave a distraction so much as I crave a new way of seeing, for truth, I have found, is so hard to acquire in this moment, that when I do find it, I moan audibly. I let out a sigh. I finally breathe. I turned each page of Mammother not because I felt some deep need to know what would happen, but because I felt the book a mirror, and saw the whole world looking back. In an essay Schomburg wrote for the online journal The Volta, he asserted, “Gazing will hold our attention for a very long time.” Mammother is a lesson in such gazing. We gaze into the hole that dying leaves. We gaze into the things the dying leave behind. We gaze into people and their lives and what they stuff deep inside them and what they reveal and the actions such stuffing and revealing translate to. I don’t know what we do after the gazing. I hope we are a little better for it, whatever better means.
  I don’t know what will happen when I get to Boston. I don’t know how to greet someone I’ve never met who is just about to leave this earth, what kind of pressure to apply to the hand, to offer a kiss to the forehead or the cheek. At the burial for my friend’s father, we held flowers and waited for the priest to give us permission to place them on the coffin. The plot was there. The hole was in the ground. I could, through a small space between the wood and the earth, see all the way down. It was terrifying. I had been reading Mammother on the Long Island-bound train earlier that morning and thought of Mano and his lessons about death. I thought that, if everyone in the crowd had been able to sit or stand or lie down in the earth before the burial, maybe it would make the whole thing easier. Maybe we would find it comfortable. The softness of dirt, the bits of rock lodging into the sore spots of our muscles. Maybe it would give us something to think of when we left, the same way we think of a childhood bed, or an ex-lover’s, and how we can hear the springs squeaking beneath our weight. I don’t know. It was when we left the flowers on the coffin that we cried the most. Maybe because we gave away some last thing. Maybe because we had to leave. Maybe because we felt that somewhere, still, in that coffin, was a breath of life that we were about to leave alone. Maybe because we felt, too, a little more alone. I don’t know.
  To me, the three most important words in this language are I don’t know, and they seem to be the operative words in Schomburg’s novel. I think, if I were a more cynical critic, I would find certain things at fault in the novel’s approach. There are moments in the plot that feel unnecessary or at times contrived, details that favor the poetic weight of the novel rather than forwarding some sort of narrative arc. There are also moments where you question the physics of Pie Time, and the metaphysics, too. You do this once or twice. You wonder how a body can move through a black square and into another world. And then you accept. Accept wonder. Accept joy. Sentiment. Invention. Mammother is a novel that entices you to love the writer as much as, if not more so than, the work. You also hate the writer, too. It is experiential. Both celebration and elegy. And, above all else, it is curious. About love, gender, masculinity, relationships, corporations, time, death, and life. At a certain point in Mammother, Pie Time begins to resemble a typical American city. At a certain point, Mano begins to resemble you, and you resemble Mano. You resume your foray back into the world outside of the book, expecting difference, a thing falling from the sky, and find none. In the mirror, you look at you. You want to apologize, for what, or how, or why, to whom.
  Early in Mammother, Schomburg writes, of Mano, that “empty rooms…made the world feel like it was on its first page.” All of Mammother feels like it is on its first page. Each page, caught up in the momentum of the fragment, distilled by a highly generous and sympathetic way of seeing, feels like the whole world itself is capable of being there, wide and open and unknown and unrelenting. It is the poet’s gift – how to make a line stand on its own while also being entirely dependent on the next line. That is the crux, isn’t it? We are each here and we are all here. Schomburg knows this. It is why love is both hope and grief, why trees are both limb and forest, why life is so long and far too short.
  Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of the collaborative chapbook with Melissa Smyth, This Cup of Absence (Anchor & Plume) and the books, Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (forthcoming 2017, CCM Press). He has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. He works as a college advisor in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem.

• The Nervous Breakdown
  http://thenervousbreakdown.com/tylerja/2012/04/review-of-fjords-by-zachary-schomburg/
  Word count: 765

  Review of Fjords, by
  Zachary Schomburg
  By J. A. Tyler
  April 11, 2012

  Poetry Reviews

  In 2007 Black Ocean released Zachary Schomburg’s The Man Suit, a poetic collection that sprawls in gasps of poetry, full of imagery and surreal landscapes, tinged with faux history and savagely tender deaths. Then in 2009, Black Ocean released his second book, Scary, No Scary, which took these surreal landscapes even farther, threading them into a pseudo-narrative of hummingbirds and trees and visions of fright, blooming in a triumphant poetic score. And now, since the excellent people at Black Ocean are either smart enough or lucky enough to continue publishing Schomburg’s work, we get Fjords.

  In this beautiful new volume, Schomburg writes from his signature surreal vantage, but one this time of fjords and ice-flows and boats melded with ghosts and bodily transformations and lost limbs. And though this is familiar territory for Schomburg, the most brilliant aspect of surrealism as a poetic approach is that it is limitless. So in Fjords we get the poem ‘THE WOMAN WHO FALLS FROM THE SKY’:

  “This is how / everyday starts with us, a kind of waking up into / the day in front of me, and then every night she / falls through a dark hole. I should say this isn’t / exactly true, the part about falling through the sky. / The truth is we woke up like the rest of you, in a / bed with our hot mouths falling open. But it was / glorious, a goddamned miracle, the crashing into / and the never dying.”

  And it is followed by the poem ‘THE KILLING TREES’:

  “I take a train to the forest and stand before / the tallest tree. It’s time I tell it, but it keeps / standing. When I try chopping it down, a cloud / falls on me, and then a burning airplane, and then / my mother and father, and then more burning / airplanes.”

  These flow into dozens of other surreal landscapes, looping back on images and creating new ones, all tromping in and around and through one another. It is a limitless space indeed, but one in which Schomburg is perfectly comfortable, easily digestible, and brazenly, justifiably confident.

  Fjords is also an apt illustration of Schomburg’s evolution from previous collections, expertly merging the best aspects of both. Fjords takes the same slant to imagery as The Man Suit, moving quickly from one to the next, seemingly unconcerned with poem to poem transitions, while also latching on to the narrative elements of Scary, No Scary, shaping separate poetic vignettes into a collective faux-narrative, one where thematic threads build the story of our protagonist, a man who is staving off his impending and imminent death by ignoring it, by dreaming against it.

  Comparisons aside, Fjords affords us one wholly unique and incredible gesture within its pages, completely distinct from The Man Suit and Scary, No Scary: using death to explore love. Fjords opens and closes on the coast of Spitsbergen, where the fjords offer the protagonist’s icy finish:

  from ‘WHAT WOULD KILL ME’, the opening poem:

  “I grew / old distracting myself from what I knew to be true. / And then, just like I knew it would, it came late one / night, booming with slowness, from the fjords.”

  from ‘THE RECKONER’, the closing poem in Fjords:

  “The air is clean and cold. I can / hear the ice breaking in the distance. There is a / woman in a long black dress and a black scarf over / her face. Welcome to Spitzbergen she says. Then she / lifts up her dress. Nothing happens next.”

  But what occurs between these deathly houses is the core of Fjords, a variety of animal transformations and rebirths, all in one way or another intently focused on love – the love of life as an immeasurable entity. Fjords uses its poems to remind us that death and love are intrinsically linked, that to envision death is to remember love, that to die is to remember the love of living, so that even as our father is split from our side, even as the oncoming world severs all ties, it is love that makes death so brutal:

  from ‘THE ANIMAL SPELL’:

  “The truth is there is no such / thing as spells. The world is always as it is, and / always as it seems. And love is just our own kind / voice that we whisper into our own blood.”

• This Is the Title of My Blog
  https://thisisthetitleofmyblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/book-review-fjords-vol-i-by-zachary-schomburg/
  Word count: 946

  Book Review: Fjords vol. I by Zachary Schomburg
  April 19, 2012
  Like teeth, perhaps meaning should be considered an inalienable possession. Teeth are considered such because a sentence like “I have some missing teeth” sounds perfectly idiomatic, even though the speaker has something that’s missing. Compare this to a sentence like “I have a missing five-dollar bill,” which sounds a bit odd to most native English speakers. Thus it is with beautiful things – we know they possess meaning, even if it seems to be lost. From “The Wild Meaninglessness:”

  The people here have all fallen in love with their own meaninglessness. But I’m not sure what that means. I mean, what else can we do but mean? Just the other day, for example, we threw strawberries from the roof at birds. We can’t help it. I mean, we can’t help anything at all.

  So maybe we must swallow these poems without chewing. They are (already) tessellations of memory, fantasy, and fear that re-discover the missing beauty of the quotidian. Schomburg’s work differs from that of other surreal narrative prose-poets by the frequently didactic tone. He both assigns us dreams and instructs us on how to interpret them. From “The Animal Spell:”

  Someone once told me that animals are people under spells, and if you fall in love with them the spell will be lifted. I recently fell in love with a black trumpeter swan.

  …

  The truth is there is no such thing as spells. The world is always as it seems. And love is just our own kind voice that we whisper into our own blood.

  Personally, I can’t hear about a black swan without understanding it as a symbol of something that could not have been anticipated. There are several such recurring images of considerable symbolic cache in our culture. Water is the nothingness that separates being and being. In particular, fjords are cliffs where land meets water; fjords are the places where we fall into nothingness; fjords are where we get our dying from. Wordsworth tried to assure us that we can always return to the shore. Stevens, that “all the world is a shore.” Schomburg seems to be adding “until it’s a cliff.”

  Then there is the red balloon, which makes me think of Albert Lamorisse’s wonderful film “Le Ballon Rouge.” Perhaps it represents one’s youthful vitality, one’s strength and will in solitude, which we futilely try to share with those we love:

  This is how you love: you try over and over again to throw a red balloon across the river from a tree.

  When, then, three poems later I read the line “there is so much blood in the trees” I must think of this poem by Emily Dickinson. Perhaps it is the still point at the center of Schomburg’s turning imagination:

  You’ve seen Balloons set — Haven’t You?
  So stately they ascend —
  It is as Swans — discarded You,
  For Duties Diamond —

  Their Liquid Feet go softly out
  Upon a Sea of Blonde —
  They spurn the Air, as t’were too mean
  For Creatures so renowned —

  Their Ribbons just beyond the eye —
  They struggle — some — for Breath —
  And yet the Crowd applaud, below —
  They would not encore — Death —

  The Gilded Creature strains — and spins —
  Trips frantic in a Tree —
  Tears open her imperial Veins —
  And tumbles in the Sea —

  The Crowd — retire with an Oath —
  The Dust in Streets — go down —
  And Clerks in Counting Rooms
  Observe — “‘Twas only a Balloon” —

  The imagery of Schomburg is densely but fluidly inter-connected. Swans become strawberries become red balloons become red rooms openning up to a field of dying swans. This a world where we live lonely lives on islands until we reach a cliff and then “nothing else happens.”

  Even if we find a pony that can carry us over the river to new ground, somehow we are disappointed. From “Testy Pony:”

  But the testy pony rears and approaches the river with unfettered bravery. Its leap is glorious. It clears the river with ease, not even getting its pony hooves wet. And then there we are on the other side of the river, the sun going down, the pony circling, looking for something to eat in the dirt. Real trust is to do so in the clear face of doubt, and to trust is to love. This is my failure, and for this I cannot be forgiven.

  And this is why, personally, I like trees better than oceans. Islands, after all, are just the leaves of some giant underwater tree. The ocean is the process of branching. And this is why Zachary Schomburg’s poetry is so moving: It is written at the place where the branches come together. Language is a body yearning to reach past itself. And these poems succeed in doing so. They discover commonality in an age when that is an increasingly difficult task.They are able to do so because we all have dreams, and Schomburg knows how to make sense of them.

  Fjords, vol I is Zachary Schomburg’s third book of poems, following The Man Suit and Scary, No Scary. It has been published by the most excellent Black Ocean Press. I encourage you to support your own imagination by purchasing a subscription to their books.

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• Bookslut
  http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2012_06_019148.php
  Word count: 1432

  JUNE 2012
  ELIZABETH CANTWELL
  POETRY
  FJORDS VOL. 1 BY ZACHARY SCHOMBURG

  Years ago, my grandfather told me a story about a man predicting his own death. The details of it are lost to me now -- I believe the man in the story dreams about his death, foresees that it will occur violently in a certain field. Attempting to avoid that fate, he acquires some vicious guard dogs to ward off danger. And then one day he comes to the very spot on which he's dreamed he'll die, and he becomes terrified, and the dogs sense his fear and turn on him. So he does die on that spot. Like something out of Oedipus, he's caused the death he knew was coming.

  That story was in the front of my mind as I read Zachary Schomburg's third full-length collection of poems, FJORDS vol. 1. The book opens with the line "From the very beginning I knew exactly what would kill me." The curious thing about the speaker's prediction is not only that it's true, but also that it kicks off a series of innumerable other deaths, all perhaps caused by the speaker's own obsessions and anxieties.

  If you are familiar with Zachary Schomburg's work, you'll be familiar with his compact prose poems, his preference for the sentence over the line, his surreal worlds, his intrusive animals that waver between comforting and terrifying. But FJORDS vol. 1 is not simply a retreading of old territory. It seems to follow a logical progression in Schomburg's oeuvre. The Man Suit, Schomburg's first book, can be read as a sort of discovery of the world. A waking up to the impossible weirdness of what we've all agreed to live in: an exploration of the most-present present. Scary, No Scary, book number two, is a nostalgic exploration of the bizarre nature of childhood -- and a reinterpretation of the present through that lens of the past. And FJORDS vol. 1 is about the future. It's about the fear that comes with talking about the future, with dreaming about the future -- and the specific fear of death that at times becomes so obsessive that it approaches a desire for death.

  At times, Schomburg implies that we might desire death because of the nature of twenty-first-century life: a surreal, intrusive, over-stimulating, impossible experience. "I grew old distracting myself from what I knew to be true," the narrator says. How many of us have done this, are doing this right now? We know certain things to be true: global warming, obesity, overfishing, decreased attention spans, Michael Bay's existence, advertising, pink slime masquerading as meat. But to think about these things is terrifying. And so we distract ourselves instead: we check email, we watch YouTube videos of pigs playing with dogs, we TiVo Jimmy Fallon, we run ourselves ragged on treadmills at the gym.

  What we don't do if we're trying to avoid reality is write poems, because writing poems is never really a way to escape. It is only a way to embroil yourself further, a way of reckoning. A way of experiencing these deaths and trying to come to terms with what they really are. Schomburg knows this.

  And yes, "deaths" is plural. Because we all die multiple deaths, don't we? We die in our dreams all the time. We die in our memories. We die in our photographs. In "Death Letter," the speaker receives a letter stating that the woman he loves is dead. But when he arrives at her house with flowers to pay his respects, he discovers that she is still alive. "When I walk away, flowers in my fist, I think about all the different kinds of death. I wish she would have been dead just like the letter said. There is more truth in that kind of death."

  Let's talk about truth. Schomburg's poems are manifestly not "true," in that they unfold in impossible worlds; yet there is something to be said for truth as a tone in Schomburg's work. For a kind of "sincerity" that is not cloying or maudlin because it takes surreal forms. It is possible to be truthful when talking about hawks made out of donuts, in a more real way than the truth that comes with a recitation of historical facts. I know that I am the most true when I am talking about irrational things. I am more true when I say "Sometimes I think the baristas at Starbucks are lying to me" or "I worry that if I get my teeth straightened I will not be able to recognize myself" than when I say "I washed a pair of jeans today."

  "Truth" is an entry in the index to this book. All of Schomburg's books have indices, a device that verges on cute-gimmick territory. But the indices operate on more intentional levels. They seem, in part, to taunt the critic who would analyze the book; "Here, I know you're interested in themes, so I pointed some out for you." But they don't just identify themes, they testify to them. There is something to be said for acknowledging your obsessions, owning up to the things you can't get away from -- organizing them alphabetically to give them some semblance of order, when really they're raging inside your head.

  "The world is always as it is, and always as it seems," as Schomburg notes in "The Animal Spell." There will always be black swans and refrigerators and fists and eyes everywhere we look. What can you really do about that but write it down and note the page numbers and try not to let it swallow you up? That is the only honest option. In "A Life In Space," Schomburg writes, "You promised me we'd live in a different universe, but when we arrived, everything was the same -- the gravity, the stars lined up like teeth." There is no different universe. There's just this one, over and over. These days, these deaths. And if there is any comfort, it only resides in the most dangerous territory.

  Take "Neighborhood Plague":

  My neighbors have been dying, one after the other in a row, each day, from east to west. You told me that if I didn't want to end up dead like my neighbors, that I should keep moving west. That seems like the last direction I'd want to move in.

  We should not move in the direction that death is moving -- it will catch up with us, of course. It will sneak up on us from behind and take us and no one around us will care because everyone will be dying, too. No, the solution is to move in the direction from which death has already come. To go back into the wake of death. Only then can we begin to deal with it. Only then can we begin to stop being afraid and start listening. We all have a dead person inside of us ("I Am the Dead Person Inside Me"). And we have to let it breathe to cope with the life we live in now, the life of customized cake frosting and movie theaters and expensive dress shirts and events that seem like causes but don't reap any immediate effects, until we die, and then we think maybe that was the effect. Or we would think that, anyway, if we were still alive to think it.

  Schomburg's meditations on death (and on the opposite but equal phenomenon, living forever, which appropriately enough shares an index entry with "Death") often seem to be a way of thinking about what it means to be present, to be breathing in the now, to be a human in a busy world. As much as the speaker might be attempting to fool you into thinking that he thinks it's all meaningless, this whole "let's eat breakfast and go to our jobs and watch movies" routine, it's clear he can't live up to his own cynicism. That he, too, is striving to prove what he feels in his (attacked) heart to be true: that there is some importance at the root of all this, that life (like Schomburg's poetry) will keep surprising us with meanings just when we've given up: "We think we've figured it out, and then it is a fist that comes exploding from our eyes."

  FJORDS vol. 1 by Zachary Schomburg
  Black Ocean
  ISBN: 978-0984475254
  72 pages

• Jacket
  http://jacketmagazine.com/33/arrieu-king-schomburg.shtml
  Word count: 1800

  Jacket 33 — July 2007 link Jacket 33 Contents page link Jacket Homepage
  Nib
  BOOK REVIEW
  Cynthia Arrieu-King reviews
  The Man Suit
  by Zachary Schomburg
  Black Ocean, ISBN 0-9777709-3-1

  This review is about 4 printed pages long. It is copyright © Cynthia Arrieu-King and Jacket magazine 2007.

  Meaningful dreamscapes
  1

  It would be fair to say surrealism in American poetry had a late start. Probably delayed by the Moderns. Probably, as Dana Gioia asserts, the need for a meaningful dreamscape in art was met in other ways, like animated cartoons. So it seems that in the seventies, in American poetry, Edson, Tate, Simic and even Donald Justice tried out surrealism to release verse from its fences and prose poetry from its dull labor. Simic perhaps had atavism for surrealism by virtue of being Eastern European and having grown up in the middle of a war. Edson came to it most likely as the best vehicle for his everyman scenarios. Tate endured in that vein, turning out material that felt cut quite from its own cloth. But the need for automatic writing that has been crafted to represent something with the burning intensity of childhood’s mind — as Breton defines surrealism — persists into today’s aesthetics.

  Man Suit, cover
  paragraph 2

  Zachary Schomburg’s debut collection of poetry The Man Suit takes surreal and meaningful stances, a few approaching disorder and chaos. The volume layers its themes and recurring figures the way music can double back to make sure your heart grows heavy: a sweetheart named Marlene, an ominous Everyman, Carlos, parables about the woods, myths about women like hollowed out trees later balanced by myths about men like hollowed out trees, macabre and giddy reinterpretations of history. The latter include not only the poems from Schomburg’s chapbook Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene but sophisticated, abstracted cosmologies reminiscent of Edson or Simic or Tate, well-anchored in sadness and bright with touches of disarming humor.

  3

  The poems deploy weights and counterweight pairs like the civilized and the brutal; the real and the uncanny, or an almost grotesque sweetness trying to mask loneliness. These counteractive forces allow Schomburg to write poems about ontological absurdities already gestured at in American poetry. His poems distinguish themselves with a particular kind of humor, and by underscoring the fabricated qualities of history, and the sad finality of our destruction of nature.

  4

  There is in Schomburg’s surrealism a combination of the civilized and the brutal that insists on the extinguishable quality of humanness. Like Tate, Schomburg records a twisted, neighborly hope, or, like Edson, violent, dreary complications of the everyday. Some examples like “Far From Marlene” start out with the crowd viewing the magically afflicted, in this case, a man with birds nesting in his “messed up” hair (47). Soon the poem matches delicacy like, “Birds are in it/laying eggs” with “He’s heard this shit before/and he gets in full/karate stance.” The diction of the latter quote could seem sophomorically set against the quiet of the first lines except that the poem shifts point of view (or reveals a hidden point of view). The poem ends with the “I” writing the ubiquitous Marlene a letter about the guy with birds in his hair and ends with the understatement, “I go on to tell her/about the birds/and the cake/using some pretty/good cursive.” That “pretty good” emotionally removes the angry karate guy as a phenomenon, not an easy joke. All the objects in the poem, chocolate cake, a large knife, the cursive, Marlene, feel like a meta-message about automatic communication and numbness in the face of the brutal.

  Zachary Schomburg
  Zachary Schomburg

  5

  This pairing of the surreal and the plain – and the askew jump in point of view – removes reality and humanity from the poem, the way the idea of motion seems sucked out of a painting by Hopper. The effect has as much “joke” in the tone as surrealist predecessors, but the joke is not in the people and objects Schomburg sets before us. A similar paralysis occurs in many poems, like “I’ve Since Folded This Poem into an Airplane” in which Marlene, it turns out, is made of snow. In “Halloween” the speaker actually makes his own emblem of false feeling, a sock puppet – a move critic Frederick Karl would ascribe a Southern feeling for its combination of the grotesque and the formal – then uses it to rein in the unruly beard on the real face of the speaker. The speaker’s personality, feelings, self-constructed happiness, the body’s needs, become a process held at an eerie remove. When aliens in “I’m Not Carlos” (28) ask the speaker “(g)ive us the man suit, Carlos,” Schomburg delivers a pleasurably spooky emphasis to haphazard, vulnerable existence.

  6

  What also feels new is Schomburg’s use of the historical in the portion of the book, “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene, “ (57-72) also a chapbook by Horse Less Press. André Breton said, “(Surrealism) is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.” Yet, the long series of poems about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination allow the frame of history to appear.

  7

  The sequence starts with about five lines that seem a straightforward account of the 16th president’s assassination. Then the “angelic face” of M., the reader might think, is the recurring figure of Marlene suddenly gone back in time. Though the poem refers to the killer Booth and his expressions (57), wild figures tear logic apart: daggers in the ceiling (57), a sexy legged accomplice and a “blood-spattered St. Bernard” (57). The borders of this reproduction diorama have fallen down and randomness proceeds to cyclone anything through its winds. The attachment to the recurring, human characters is constantly torn apart. The reader has to reassemble the juxtaposed times, realities and objects over and over – including Lincoln killing “a few audience members… before turning the revolver on himself” (62).

  8

  Freud used to argue that the surreal didn’t really come from the unconscious, that surrealism was a quite an ego-dominated and shaped surface. Many parts of the Lincoln section seem to have rustic realistic edges and in others the speaker seems to wink at the audience, “M. thinks this is entirely untrue, but I have my suspicions.” (63). The outrageousness becomes broad, scrambled, and hard to engage with as in Japanese noise music, even for long passages. Then, suddenly, it seems the unconscious (or is it the conscious mind leading the unconscious) waves a little hand toward an end: In a cogent, sad, litany of flames shaped like various objects, the reader detects how Lincoln himself becomes meaningless and ephemeral as our history’s own insistent violence continues:

  9

  “A woman-shaped flame. A whale-shaped flame. An ocean-shaped flame. The woman-shaped flame is inside the whale-shaped flame. The whale-shaped flame is inside the ocean-shaped flame...A breach-shaped flame...A Lincoln-shaped flame directly behind Lincoln. It is his soul on fire. It has already left his body...A Lincoln-shaped flame. A Lincoln-shaped flame” (69).

  10

  By the end of the sequence, Schomburg’s speaker and his M. are back at home by a fire, and American insouciance and comfort in the form of the couple once again frame and keep at arm’s length an infernal, bloody, nonsensical history – the fire. The poem adds up to a performance piece, dotted with a humor and violence that could seem irrelevant except that the ignored lessons of history seem to be the undeniably urgent message set forth.

  11

  If Schomburg insists – with a kind of airy, goofy humor’s help – that human existence is ephemeral and numbed, and that history is a monster piece of chaos subsumed by self-interest, Schomburg’s surrealism seems ultimately to remind the reader that pure nature is ending. Early in the book, the poem “What Everyone is Wearing” uses ecosystems and trees on an absurd scale to permit a scolding chaos to whip up. The potentially environmental message is drowned by a deeply subjective, at-root cynical equation of nature and human existence: “The tiny canaries cleared some space in the trees on their heads to wear small apartment complexes there. The tiny rabbits: supermarkets. The tiny elk cleared space to wear small churches on their heads and even tinier people started worshipping there” (27).

  12

  These last lines of the poem critiques our hubris in the face of all of nature, and the changeable nature of our livelihood, sustainability, etc. This vulnerability to shape-shifting makes a particularly hilarious turn in “A Band of Owls Moved into Town”. The invasion of a small town by owls is discussed in the tsk-ing manner we save for urban sprawl or darker attitudes usually masking racism, “A band of owls moved into town. They shopped for groceries and ran for office, that kind of thing.” This satire of fears, rendered as xenophobia of owls, ends with an exchange between the speaker and Julia, a “daughter of new and prosperous socialites...” (17). She agrees that she and the speaker are the only two “who...who...” That’s the end of the poem. The reader is helpless before this kind of goofy punning that also implies the inescapable likeness between all – owls and townies: find your own parallels in real life.

  13

  Sometimes the fabulous chaos of The Man Suit makes a funny, absurd, strident sound that it also critiques, but other times the poems are in such focus at the joining point of the humorously surreal and the painful, that you can’t help but want to know what this young poet’s work will become in the next decades. I would bet Schomburg’s work will be truly frightening, and I would hope that it remains a bit moral and devastating, as in another of the poems that indicate an end to nature. In “A Voice Box with Words Still in It,” the last poem of the collection, our old friend, the somewhat ironically human Carlos finds a voice box “inside the throat of a dead sheep”. If you “blow just right” into the voice box, it reveals the bucolic and wholesome secrets only a human would think a sheep contemplates: “where the best and worst grass is” and “how to blend it” (105). An unknown speaker tests Carlos’ hypothesis and the true voice of the sheep blisters in this terror-filled line:

  14

  Me: {I take a shallow breath and blow}. I am dying, so cold without wool, and afraid. (105)

• Bookslut
  http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2007_05_011045.php
  Word count: 752

  MAY 2007
  D. RICHARD SCANNELL
  POETRY
  THE MAN SUIT BY ZACHARY SCHOMBURG

  Delightfully bewildering, The Man Suit is less a book of poems and more an unlikely conglomeration of images and ideas that manage to function beautifully as one cohesive unit. These poems and paragraphs demand to be read aloud -- both performance and text are indispensable to achieving the full effect.

  The book does not waste time churning up the succession of poems before it. These poems spring forward or, when that’s not feasible, sideways. Do expect self-consciousness -- the book buzzes with solipsism, paralysis, confusion and isolation. Yet somehow the dark undercurrent that fuels this collection never extinguishes the glow of its playfulness.

  Take a look at the first three poems and try to keep a straight face. In just three pages Schomburg introduces a monster that’s supposed to be telling jokes, a gorilla dressed in people clothes, a pirate, a girl wearing a large, wooden wedding cake, and a man dressed as an avocado. The tone wavers between weird, hilarious, insightful, and subtly devious.

  In the first poem, “The Monster Hour,” we see a monster on stage who keeps on trying to kill the audience instead of telling jokes. The monster doesn’t seem able to control himself, so the producers replace him with a gorilla and a Wurlitzer. It’s silly, slightly baffling, yet manages to edge itself up to something very familiar and vaguely haunting.

  The second poem seems serious at first. It creates a possibly artistic scene in which a man and a naked women are trying to interpret the black square painted on her stomach. Then, where another poet might have written an oblique but mysterious aphorism, Schomburg writes simply, “A pirate enters.” The message is clear. Take off the black beret and put down the expensive pinot noir. You probably couldn’t tell it apart from boxed merlot anyway.

  At this point one wonders if the book is going to be spitefully irreverent, but Schomburg dispels any fears with the third poem, “The Center of Worthwhile Things,” perhaps the thesis of the entire book. A girl dressed as a wedding cake and a guy dressed as an avocado make love on a cliff over a lake, and the speaker wonders at the lack of theatrical accompaniment to life’s quiet, but unusual moments, “It was a night of being backstage I thought, where nothing held its illusion, where everything was exposed as an actor.”

  The Man Suit never fully lets down its guard though. That’s its charm. It deals in oceans and islands, opera singers and owls, axe-murderers and action figures. It is a collection of inquiries into how we are supposed to deal with this man suit once we’ve put it on. When we stand in the spotlight, whether on stage or at a party full of sadists and murderers, how are we supposed to handle ourselves?

  Amidst the many clever, funny, and sometimes confusing poems are a few themed chunks. One is titled only pictorially: a black telephone beside a white telephone. It is oblique, sometimes funny, sometimes vaguely satirical. By the end of the twelve pages, though, it manages to create the sensation that maybe there are mysteries patterned in the banalities and common objects of everyday life.

  Another chunk of the book, “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene,” was previously published as a chapbook. Its sixteen paragraphs read like the script for an experimental movie made by a director who was completely unconscious of the extent to which pop culture had scrambled his creative faculties. Expect sexy legs in fishnet stockings, Siamese triplets, religious symbols, splattered blood, flames engulfing practically everything, and far too many smoking guns.

  The Man Suit is more than a collection of witty poems and off-beat jokes. Schomburg has encapsulated modern life in just one hundred or so pages. The bizarre imagination that spirals through the poems wonders, creates, and feeds upon itself. By the end of the book, as the things that haunt the space between consciousness and daydream take shape, the image in “A Voice Box With Words Still In It” will bring tears to your eyes, and even if you’ve read this review, you won’t know what hit you.

  The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg
  Black Ocean
  ISBN: 0977770931
  112 pages

• THE VOLTA BLOG
  https://thevoltablog.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/review-the-book-of-joshua-by-zachary-schomburg/
  Word count: 987

  MAY 9, 2016
  REVIEW: The Book of Joshua by Zachary Schomburg
  The Book of Joshua 02j

  by Matthew Schmidt

  Birds. Horses. A boat. Blood. The color white. A telephone.

  These and other recurring motifs and objects make up The Book of Joshua by Zachary Schomburg. It is a strange journey indeed; beginning in the year 1977 and moving through 2044, the first two sections titled Earth and Mars are prose poems with only the year as title. Schomburg was born in 1977 and the third section of lineated poetry, Blood, begins on page 77. This most likely is not a coincidence as numbers are important to the book, however, only 67 years elapse in book time (though the final section does not contain years or individual poem titles).

  I bring these points up to note the meditative quality of the poetry. Moving as if through the speaker’s life and to a possible future, Schomburg questions himself, his place in the world, and what is expected of him through the birth of himself/Joshua and his maturation. 1981 has the speaker slowly growing:

  Screen Shot 2016-05-09 at 9.31.51 AM

  While the speaker (who is possibly an avatar of Schomburg) and Joshua appear to be the same person, it is debatable. We can assess the similarities to Schomburg’s life (or time of existence), the fact that a character known as the Woman is writing The Book of Joshua in The Book of Joshua, or that The Book of Joshua in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is attributed to Joshua but most likely has several contributing authors. Arguments could be made for all three and perhaps other interpretations. Suffice it to say, the book is an amalgamation of various sources and ideas.

  According to The Poetry Foundation, Schomburg himself wants his poetry to “generate…energy through confusion…in an emotional sense.” This is true of the book; strange things happen that the reader must grapple with: Joshua comes into being from the speaker’s throat (spoken into existence), the speaker makes himself/Joshua into a machine (much like our bodies mechanically regulate our temperature, blood flow, etc.) so that he can talk to him(self), travels to Mars, swims an ocean of blood, births his own father, and plays the game Family (like how we interact with our families). Yes, this sounds confusing, but ultimately it isn’t narratively confusing. It allows us to emotionally consider our lives, what we’re doing with them, why we act as we act, what it means to say something, and that we keep looking for something even though we don’t know what it is.

  Screen Shot 2016-05-09 at 9.32.01 AM

  I think it’s important to look at an entire poem like this to understand the movement of the work: how things grow and shrink, questions are asked aloud and of the self, feelings are considered and communication and place are questioned for their validity. Dreams and nightmares clash in the speaker’s mind as reality and emotional identity are pursued seemingly through funhouse mirrors. Think about it: we go to carnivals and pay money to look at ourselves in variously-shaped mirrors. Certainly it is fun, but it also is a way we can be something else for a moment, or think we look a different way than we look. Are the mirrors in our homes (flat, regular mirrors) really telling us the truth when we look in them? Isn’t it strange how we can look smashing in one photograph and awful in the next? Schomburg takes us to this existential realm and allows us the opportunity to look at himself/Joshua/ourself. We can ask hard, emotional questions and decide how seriously we wish to consider answers.

  I’ll admit the first time I read the book and arrived at the third section I was nonplussed. An immensely engaging story has been going on for 70-plus pages and now I’m confronted with line breaks and lots of white space. Much of these lines repeat what has happened in the first two sections and I was lost. This is part of the point though. In life, just as we begin to think we understand something, find a rhythm, get comfortable, something changes. We think back over what has changed and try to pinpoint what we thought and felt about the events preceding the change and we come up with fragments of thought, a distorted reality. Often we mull these fragments over and over in our minds before arriving at a somewhat abstract conclusion. This is what the last section of the book enacts as form:

  Screen Shot 2016-05-09 at 9.32.16 AM

  Screen Shot 2016-05-09 at 9.32.29 AM

  Many of these ideas are all ready in our mind because we just read them. They return here in a different form and elicit different meaning with line breaks, white space, and brevity that make us take more time to pause and consider them in relation to their previous meanings. Time changes things or things change over time. We alter our understandings and make new connections. Joshua is the speaker is Zachary is me and you. Is robotic. Is equine. Is creating from the mouth and bird bones. This is definitely a trip, moving through the solar system and our blood stream simultaneously, issuing from mouths and entering ears, creating a new planet that is this same planet, learning what to do with our bodies and minds and importantly asking our emotional selves how we feel and that we do. I think you should get in the spaceship. Think you should go read this book.

  Buy it from Black Ocean: $19.95

  Matthew Schmidt studies English at The Center for Writers, The University of Southern Mississippi.

• Colorado Review
  http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/the-book-of-joshua/
  Word count: 1558

  Book Review
  The Book of Joshua

  Poetry
  By Zachary Schomburg

  Reviewed By J.G. McClure

  Black Ocean Press (2014)
  128 pages
  $19.95
  Buy this book
  Zachary Schomburg’s The Book of Joshua is an unusual book. The eponymous character haunts the whole collection—and yet we’re never entirely sure who he is. Joshua is, at various points: a creature that emerges from the speaker’s throat, a robot, the speaker (who insists this is a mistake), a collection of dead birds, and a sailor on a sea of blood.

  Despite Joshua’s disjointed identity, the book is unusually unified. It begins with a poem titled “1977,” and proceeds as a chronological narrative, a poem for every year. Near the start of the book, after the speaker becomes attached to Joshua (literally: their hearts are hooked together and robo-Joshua pumps the speaker’s blood), Joshua dies. The following poem/year is simply a blank page—we sense that the speaker is devastated beyond words by the loss. Much of the rest of the book narrates the speaker’s search for Joshua who, although dead, the speaker believes he can find.

  The narrative doesn’t quite make sense—why look for Joshua if he’s dead?—and yet the force of the speaker’s longing is enough to make the reader accept this surreal plot. Though it may not make logical sense, the search for the dead Joshua makes complete emotional sense as a reflection of the psychology of grief. This blend of the surreal and the sympathetic plays out at the level of the individual poems as well. Take, for example, “1991”:

  One night I dreamed that everything in the cave was different—the furniture, the wallpaper. When I walked to my bed, a little baby was sleeping in it. It wasn’t my bed. I thought the baby was you. Are you Joshua? I asked it. Are you the accidental baby of God? Are you a horse? Are you a tiny blue swan? Can I peel open your eyes? I asked it. I am sorry I am a strawberry patch, it said. And then growing from its middle came my own unforgiveableness, an impossibly beautiful strawberry patch to feed me forever.

  Though the poem is full of surreal elements, they proceed in a strangely logical fashion: the speaker sees an unfamiliar baby in the cave where he lives, so naturally he asks what’s going on. The baby, naturally, answers: I am a strawberry patch. And sure enough, it’s true. This blend of sense and nonsense is Schomburg’s specialty, and he uses it to great effect throughout the book. “1991” reflects another more important key to the book’s success: even in its most surreal moments, it remains firmly grounded in pathos. We get the odd leap to a strawberry patch, yes—but we’re simultaneously reminded of the speaker’s sense of guilt following Joshua’s death, his touching sense of his “own unforgiveableness” that will “feed [him] forever.”

  In other words, the book never resorts to strangeness merely for the sake of strangeness; rather, the surreal happenings are carefully selected images of the speaker’s loss. Indeed, strange as its surface may seem, the book always remains firmly anchored in emotional truth. Consider, for example, the frightening “1994”:

  I stopped sleeping and started digging graves to jump into. I saw a horse eating her own horse babies. Horses sometimes get confused and eat their own horse babies, and then they groan for days once their mind finally clears. They groan, so ashamed, so afraid of themselves, and walk around in circles not eating anything. They are newly alone with bloody mouths. I had a new thirst for blood. I started to kill things I wouldn’t dare love.

  Since the speaker in a sense gave birth to Joshua, we can’t help but read the horse as a metaphorical reflection of the speaker. So the horse’s shame and fear of itself are also the speaker’s, and we pity him. But immediately we are reminded of the speaker’s unforgiveableness: he has “a new thirst for blood” and starts to “kill things [he] would not dare love.” We sense that the speaker wants us to see him as the unforgiveable monster he believes himself to be—a complex portrait of guilt.

  Yet the speaker does not seem beyond forgiveness. Rather, he’s a deeply sympathetic character, and he has the capacity for a strange sort of tenderness. He repeatedly tries to comfort a distraught character, and he sometimes emerges from his grief to act for others. Take, for instance, “2003”:

  I decided I would be king of the island. I stumbled upon a field of headless corpses, and then I stumbled upon a field of heads. I collected all the heads in a large basket. This was my first act as king. Then I set them down miles apart from each other across the empty expanse. I put candles inside each skull so they’d look like stars to some other boy, some boy like me, maybe in space.

  While we might expect the speaker to reunite the bodies with their heads, he has another plan. We learn he wants to make a sea of stars for “some other boy” to look at from space: he wants to make something beautiful for someone he can scarcely imagine. We sense also the speaker’s loneliness—the only place he can imagine someone “like me” is on a distant planet. Such loneliness is a constant and moving theme in the book. In “2000,” for instance, the speaker says:

  I thought I finally found you, Joshua, floating in your white boat in the ocean. I dove into the ocean to save you, but when I surfaced, the white boat was gone. The ocean was a flat red floor. I floated past myself standing on shore. I stared at myself staring at myself. And I stared back at myself staring back at myself. There is more than one world in the world, and when a world finds another world it finally knows to feel alone.

  Once again, though the scene is completely surreal, the emotional logic is fully present. We learn something true about what it is to be alone. But perhaps the most touching aspect of the speaker’s loneliness is that it is inescapable: in “2039,” the speaker explains:

  I was tired, and I wanted to die. There was nowhere else to search and nothing else to do. I wanted someone to shoot me in the heart with a bow and arrow, but there was no one around. I laid on my back in the hole I had dug, and I shot an arrow far into the sky. When it came back down, it split my heart. It was finally time, I thought. But instead of dying, my heart just exploded into a flock of sheep and then began my burdensome years of being a shepherd. I knew I’d be horrible, these dirty sheep baaaing at my hole.

  The speaker’s attempt at suicide only makes matters worse—within the bizarre logic of this universe, suicide leads to sheep which lead, naturally, to burdensome duties as a shepherd. The speaker tries to escape again in “2040”:

  For my first duty as shepherd, I pushed all the sheep into the river. What a glorious massacre, I yelled. What a glorious day, the death of a broken heart! …

  But in “2041,” we learn that there is no escape:

  The sheep were not washed down the river to their deaths. Instead, all the water in the river was absorbed by the sheep. The river became a giant wall of soft bloody woolliness that trapped me forever…

  So in “2042,” he tries a different approach:

  I spent the year digging holes and burying wet red sheep in them: one billion graves, each filled with a dead sheep born from my split open heart…I looked for you, Joshua, in every grave I dug.

  Though the shepherding becomes increasingly absurd, we’re reminded once again of the speaker’s loss as he checks each grave for Joshua. In that way, these sheep make sense, and their stubborn presence is as touching as it is funny.

  Sympathetically surreal, funny and tragic, The Book of Joshua is an unusual book, and an unusually good one. Schomburg’s narrative—at once disjointed and unified—is fascinating as a project, and the individual poems stand strong on their own. Filled with wild flights of imagination, the book remains firmly grounded in the deep feeling of its speaker. The Book of Joshua is the surreal at its best—a gripping, challenging, and deeply rewarding experience.

  J.G. McClure holds an MFA from the University of California – Irvine. His work appears in Best New Poets 2015, Gettysburg Review, and Green Mountains Review, among others. He is the Craft Essay Editor and Assistant Poetry Editor of Cleaver, and is at work on his first collection. See more at jgmcclure.weebly.com.

• Sink
  http://sinkreview.org/reviews/zachary-schomburgs-the-book-of-joshua.html
  Word count: 1218

  The Book of Joshua
  Black Ocean
  reviewed by Jake Mariani
  Schomburg writes, “Birth is a regrettable trauma. Life is a slow farewell”, and in this short sentence encapsulates the journey taken in his book. The Book of Joshua is episodic and in its own way so anti-dramatic that it’s very much like watching an absurdist or existential drama take place as you flip from page to page and pass from year to year. With these sparse prosaic paragraphs Schomburg manages to traverse between planets and covers a fictional time span of sixty-seven years.

  Throughout the book there is a pervading tone of uncertainty, in the form of both identity and reality. The first poem establishes the narrator’s isolation, In the year of 1977 he claims:

  In the beginning no one was around…
  From there the second poem acknowledges the narrator’s unconsciousness with a nightmare:

  I had my first nightmare about dangling by an umbilical cord from a white sky above a white boat floating on blood. In it, you were asleep or worse in the boat, your name carved on the side. Joshua…
  The primary form of identity is established and from here the narrator begins his metaphysical journey. Joshua is first recognized in the narrator’s unconscious state during the year 1978 and is present for the next ten years before he passes away in 1988. With the death of Joshua, the reader is left with the distinct feeling that this marks the death of the narrator’s childhood. Leading up to this, the narrator seems to be exploring himself through Joshua. In the year 1984 Joshua’s physical form is established:

  I wanted you to be real, so I made you into a machine that pumped blood for me. You were a regular metal boy. You had a tape recorder where a regular head should be…
  The ambiguousness of Schomburg’s phrasing is what makes the story interesting. Joshua is hidden in a thick red cloud and whether he is real or imaginary is never fully understood, neither to the reader nor the narrator.

  According to the narrator, Joshua dies when he falls into his own grave. The grave was dug because they were pretending to bury their child while playing a game called Family. In a sense, the metaphysical or existential drama entered into the conscious world when Joshua fell into the hole and drowned in his own blood. This is a defining chapter in the book for several reasons. It marks the permanent absence of Joshua, who remains dead to the narrator throughout the rest of the book. Secondly, it defines the narrator’s journey of self-discovery and his endless search for a recreation of “Joshua” or what could be interpreted as his own innocence. Lastly, it begins his physical journey that takes him from “Earth” to “Mars” to “Blood,” the three sections of this book.

  After the death of Joshua, the narrator goes through a period of mourning, going as far as wanting to die. He also returns to the uncertainty of his sub-conscious, where he meets with Joshua in his dreams and is often terrorized with his own guilt. In one nightmare, he comes across a baby he thinks is Joshua, only to find out through its response that:

  I am sorry I am a strawberry patch, it said. And then grown from its middle came my own unforgivableness, an impossibly beautiful strawberry patch to feed me forever.
  Yet despite the narrator’s preoccupation with recreating Joshua, he’s not entirely absent of companions. These manifest in many different forms, the most enduring being a woman who follows him around. She is constantly on the telephone with God to ease her grief and is also recording his actions and words down in a book that she has titled “The Book of Joshua”. The narrator remarks several times, I am not Joshua, again establishing the theme of confused identity.

  The woman figure could be an easy parable for a mother, but where she is left more inconspicuous, the narrator’s father is not. He’s established after the narrator has left earth, and in a depressed and lonely state tries to recreate Joshua by impregnating himself. He gives birth to his own father in the year of 2028 and remarks:

  “I was not ready to be a son.”
  In 2029, while feeding his baby-father he’s delivered a message that appears in the form of a rolled-up letter emerging from the father’s mouth. The letter reads:

  Dear Joshua, you are a finite distance from me, and I am a finite distance from you, and that distance is eternally and hopelessly in flux.
  Family begins to take shape in the narrator’s world, one instance that might be interpreted as his mother’s depression is when he is reading “The Book of Joshua”, to his father. He reads over the lines written down, “This is only further proof of your badnessem>.”

  The father soon after deserts them and takes the spaceship from Mars. The Mother is crying louder than usual and a white boat-shaped cloud hangs low. Between the two chapters of Earth and Mars, Schomburg has managed to create what could be interpreted as an absurdist journey a child takes to not only become a man, but also to carve out for himself an identity despite the tragic loss of his own childhood. The section “Mars” ends where the journey for one’s self initially began, with the narrator playing Family, this time the Woman placing him into a grave. In the year 2044 which is the narrator’s last recording of the date he states:

  I woke up dangling from an umbilical cord that looked like a telephone cord. And there you were, Joshua, on the blood in a white boat, rocking.

  Despite the surrealist nature of the book, what grounds it is the death of one’s childhood. Whoever one may be, it is not any easy thing to come to terms with. Much less any other tragedy which may strike out at one’s family. What makes this book tangible, and what I think exemplifies Schomburg’s talent is the way in which he captures this loneliness and these pangs of fear that we all go through. He’s managed to make sense of a world and journey masked in complete absurdity.

  The section “Blood” in and of itself deserves almost a separate review. It marks a change in not only style but also tone. The short prose turns into different forms of free-verse and it’s something that Schomburg performs live with music. The narrative is not as obvious, if it is even a continuation of it at all, and one isn’t sure whether it is intended to serve as a funeral song, Joshua’s Inferno, or some sort of other purgatory. What I will say is that whether or not one agrees with it as a closing form to the narrative, doesn't much matter. Schomburg’s inscrutability prevails and it’s an eerie tribute to the life and death of Joshua.

• The Quarterly Conversation
  http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-childhood-storytelling-voice-scary-no-scary-by-zachary-schomberg
  Word count: 1333

  THE CHILDHOOD STORYTELLING VOICE: SCARY, NO SCARY BY ZACHARY SCHOMBURG
  Review by Levi Stahl — Published on March 1, 2010

  Scary, No Scary. Zachary Schomburg. Black Ocean. 80 pp., $12.95.

  When he was three years old, the son of a friend fell for a time into a habit of saying to his parents several times a day, “Remember when I was Little Seamus, and I . . ,” after which he would launch into one of the many stories his parents had told him of what he was like when he was a baby. The story charms me every time I think of it, because it reveals so much about childhood and about the way that even as—or especially as—very young children, we naturally grasp what is so important about stories, the way they simultaneously create and confirm a place for us, the solitary individual, in the larger world. Seamus, growing and changing dramatically by the day, needed to be reassured that the old him really had existed, and the best way to do that was to remind his parents of the proof they had already given, probably quite casually, of that fact.

  It was only on my second reading of Zachary Schomburg’s wonderfully strange Scary, No Scary that I realized that the distinct voice of his poems, whose provenance had been eluding me even as it felt deeply familiar, was that childhood storytelling voice. It’s more the voice of a grade-schooler than a three-year-old, but it carries that same sense of urgency, married to a simultaneous awe of and flexibility with language, natural for a child, that adults have to struggle to attain. Take this, from “New Kind of Tree,”

  There is a new kind
  of tree.

  It bleeds.

  It grows one meter per minute.

  One boy played
  too long
  in this new kind of tree.
  He is too high in the tree
  to get down.
  His family is busy blowing kisses.

  Or this, from “I Know a Dead Wolf We can Climb Inside and Beat”:

  I know a dead wold
  we can climb inside
  and beat

  like little hearts.
  It would maybe
  come back

  to life,
  the wolf.

  This is language returned to one of its essential uses, clearly describing our fears—and by describing them, domesticating them, rendering them something that falls between pleasantly shivery and laughably silly. Getting stuck up a tree may be scary, but our family will be there; a wolf is scary, but maybe we could choose to be the wolf ourselves. The discovery of language, and its power to shape and control, renders the world’s mutability fascinating rather than terrifying—who knows what we might become? Scary, no scary.

  As in children’s stories, playfulness and seriousness live side by side here, aware of no incongruity. “Goodbye Lesson” rehearses obsessions with origins and inheritance, filtered through the pleasures of repetition and injected with a shot of fear:

  I have to say goodbye. I’ve been adopted. I’ll grow up in the house on the hill with all the bats. One of my parents will be part-night, part-tree. The other will be part-person, part insect. My new sister will be part-night, part-tree, part-person, part-insect. They will all eventually die in a farm accident/wolf mauling. I am part-wolf, part-farm accident. I will be cursed with a life without end, eternally trekking through the woods.

  At times, an adult perspective—one whose understanding of loss is deeper, if still far from complete—slips in almost silently, turning the products of imagination into elegiac vows, as in this passage from “Love Is When a Boat Is Built from All the Eyelashes in the Ocean”:

  When the bats
  break
  from the mouth of
  the cave
  hold on tight
  at my waist.

  If I fall
  into the ocean
  bury what washes up
  beneath the mattress
  of my first bed.

  Other tones and voices appear, too, some as close to childhood as fairy tales, others more like myth and fable, or even fortune telling (“Your limbs / will be torn off / in a farm accident.”), but all share the same relatively plain language and straightforward, declarative, sentence-like quality. This is poetry that does not look to sound or meter to separate itself from prose (though the occasional line surprises—”We like to ride bikes and fly kites together.”); rather, it relies on its brief lines and the disjunctions they cause. The title poem offers perhaps the purest example of the way enjambment is deployed to control and delay the delivery of information:

  The old man
  hunched over
  at the front door
  will be prepared
  to give you a tour,
  but first he’ll ask
  scary, or no scary?

  You should say
  no scary.

  And a comparison between one of the book’s handful of prose poems and its lineated ones helps make clear just how deftly Schomburg uses enjambment to focus attention and set a pace. “Falling Life,” for example, is almost stately in its progress:

  You are in a very high tree.

  If you jump
  you will live a full life
  while falling

  You will get married
  to a hummingbird

  and raise beautiful part-
  hummingbirds.

  “I Was Surrounded by a Mob of People,” despite featuring similarly short sentences, positively cascades along by comparison:

  I was surrounded by a mob of people. I showed my teeth. I kicked many of them in the ribs. Many of them kicked me back, in the ribs. One of them had the face of my dead mother and one of them had the face of my dead father.

  Images, too, are crucial, and Schomburg relies largely on repetition to give his their power. From poem to poem, the same objects, the same items, turn up again and again, often in a chain that leads us from the end of one poem to the beginning of another, and on and on, giving the whole collection the feel of a gangly, permissive sestina. He takes familiar objects of fear (wolves, fire, forests, darkness, corpses, abandoned buildings) and, simply by calling them by their names while changing and re-changing their context, renders them surprising and compelling:

  Inside the woods is an abandoned hotel.
  Trees grow in the lobby
  and up through the rooms.

  Or, from “The Old Man Who Watches Me Sleep”:

  The old man who watches me sleep
  has wings

  growing from his chest.
  This is a mistake.

  It’s a technique that shares genes with surrealism, but Schomburg displays none of surrealism’s love of shock for its own sake; Scary, No Scary is far closer to Ovid (to say nothing of Steven Millhauser and Kelly Link) than to Dali, and Schomburg’s compositions are the better for it, their unexpected juxtapositions more organic and convincing.

  The surrealists, after all, were adults playing games, while children, like Ovid, are speaking the world into being—and the connections they draw, obscure though they may be, are necessary. These poems, often funny, frequently child-like, are at the same time far from whimsical. We emerge from the book as from a dream—not quite a nightmare and quickly fading—to find our backyard tent still pitch-black around us, the night still quietly rustling with breath outside.

  There’s an index to the book, so you can go straight to what you fear.

  Levi Stahl is the poetry editor for The Quarterly Conversation.

• The Lit Pub
  http://thelitpub.com/featured-books/scary-no-scary/
  Word count: 585

  Scary, No Scary
  Scary, No Scary is cleverly costumed as a Hostess cupcake.
  10/31/11
  In fact, for the purposes of this metaphor, it is a Hostess cupcake. Out of the package, it presents itself as a gaudy, misshapen darkness, but it smells great and goes well with a cup of coffee. Its ingredients have familiar names, but it's only a “cupcake” insofar as it invents its own vocabulary out of words we already know.

  The collection is appended by an index of subjects, beginning with “Bats” and ending with “World, the.” The index serves as a catalog of recurring images and scenarios that aggregate layers of intrigue as the book progresses, as Schomburg constructs new worlds out of raw memory.

  These worlds are bound by their own rules. The chair age precedes the table age, and so there is no table setting; the pond is inescapable with only one paddle; if there is a black hole present, someone will be pushed in without the slightest hesitation.

  Scary, No Scary may be read either way. Schomburg's verse is always playful, and always deadly serious: “If we stand still long enough / a gigantic meteorite / will crash into our skulls and kill us.”

  The paperback edition of Scary, No Scary has a single pitch-black page inside the front cover and immediately before the back cover, and the title poem invites the reader into a haunted house. The poems inside speak to intense loneliness, violence, and destruction, but they are also about love, simple kindness, and building boats out of eyelashes. The oppressive black exterior belies the complex nature of the white cream filling: there is careful nuance to the undeniably alluring flavor at the center of this foreboding cupcake.

  A collection of quirky, surreal poems is fine. A collection of surreal poems as sincere, clever, and modest as these is remarkable. In three sections, Schomburg demonstrates his deft mastery of the well-wrought lyric sequence. The first time you see a hummingbird or a black hole, it's charming. The second time, these images have become touchstones in the midst of a strange mythology unnervingly oblivious to any distinction between the supernatural and the everyday. There is an extent to which anything is possible in these pages, but this strangeness is always tempered by honest-to-god humanity, which is utterly terrifying if you happened to choose “scary.”

  Scary, No Scary is a wonderful book to have on your shelf, and an even better book to pull off and read while the spirits of the dead are rising from their graves. If you've missed a trip to a haunted house this season that's OK, because this book is better. It's immediately readable, hilarious and harrowing. It's surreal and it all makes perfect sense. Read this book. When you do, when the hunched, old man invites you inside and gives you the choice, choose “no scary.” You'll be glad you did.

  PAUL FAUTEUX
  Paul Fauteux received his MFA from George Mason University, where he was the 2011-2012 Completion Fellow. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ampersand, Other Poetry, Burnside Review, Regime and other magazines, and for the advocacy of other fine poets on The Lit Pub. His first chapbook, "The Best Way to Drink Tea," is out from Plan B Press. "How to Un-do Things," a book-length manuscript, was recognized as a semi-finalist in the 11th Annual Slope Editions Book Prize.

• THE MINNESOTA REVIEW
  https://minnesotareview.wordpress.com/2016/10/11/poetry-scary-no-scary/
  Word count: 555

  Poetry— Scary, No Scary?
  OCTOBER 11, 2016 / THE MINNESOTA REVIEW CREATIVE WRITING STAFF
  schomburg

  It is October and all, and you know what that means: apple-cinnamon candles, Halloweentown reruns on Disney Channel, and couples costumes at drunken parties. Add some new 2016 slasher films in the mix and we’ll call it a day. There is one thing even more scary to most, which is the dreaded monster that is poetry. Some would even say it’s scarier than Freddy Krueger himself. Yet, if we look close enough, we can find some gems that can make us scream for poetry. In a good way of course.

  If you are a sucker for creepy, twisted images and things that can be a mindfuck, then look no further—Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg is the poetry collection for you. One can assume poetry is full of dense content that requires our full attention to grasp, but for Schomburg he uses a language one can easily grasp. His images rarely consist of adjectives, but rather state different images. He has faith in the reader to get the image he is trying to convey. Rather than say “the small hummingbird,”he flat out just says “the hummingbird” because, duh, hummingbirds are crazy-small.

  Speaking of hummingbirds, there are hummingbirds present in some of his poems. In “Falling Life,” the lines “You will get married/to a humming bird/ and raise beautiful part-/hummingbirds” (11). I know what you’re thinking: hummingbirds aren’t scary. But what’s creepier than thinking about a half-human, half-hummingbird child? Maybe a bear with no legs being sawed in half, or black holes. Spoiler Alert: These are all within the Scary, No Scary collection. His poem titles are the most intriguing. Take “I Know A Dead Wolf We Can Climb Inside And Beat,”“Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In A Farm Accident,” and “I Found A Beating Heart Half-Buried In The Woods,” for example. If those titles don’t excite you, then I don’t know what does.

  What’s interesting is Schomburg uses his lines breaks to change an image entirely. “The Floor Age” shows a perfect example of this. It’s a measly two-lined poem, but so much is happening in two lines: “The chandelier crashes./There is no chandelier” (50). The first line contains the movement of the chandelier and the sounds of the glass breaking. When paired up with the second line, we get the exact opposite. We are forced to picture an area that doesn’t have this broken chandelier.

  It’s similar to when someone says “Don’t think of a pink elephant,” and of course we think of that damn pink elephant. Who would have thought that poetry has the same ability? Similar to Freddy Krueger, these poems can get inside your head and can even haunt your dreams. Someone should get on a Freddy Vs Poetry movie instead of another Freddy Vs Jason sequel. Reading Schomburg’s Scary, No Scary you will see that he is a huge contender. Freddy, you better watch out.

  Devin Koch is a Virginia Tech MFA poetry candidate. He loves enchiladas, hugs, Star Wars, and heated debates on who should be the next Bachelor. Visit him at devinhkoch.com

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