Yesterday, nominees for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize were announced. We are happy to report that Gail Mazur’s Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems is a nominee in the poetry category. Winners will be named on April 28.
Widely acclaimed for expanding the stylistic boundaries of both the narrative and meditative lyric, Gail Mazur’s poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppo’s First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazur’s four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its searching poignancy and comic bravura. Mazur’s explorations of "this fallen world, this loony world" are deeply moving acts of empathy by a singular moral sensibility—evident from the earliest poem included here, the much-anthologized "Baseball," a stunning bird’s-eye view of human foibles and passions. Clear-eyed, full of paradoxical griefs and appetites, her poems brave the most urgent subjects—from the fraught luscious Eden of the ballpark, to the fragility of our closest human ties, to the implications for America in a world where power and war are cataclysmic for the strong as well as the weak.
Gail Mazur’s books include Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems, They Can’t Take That Away from Me, and The Common, all published by the University of Chicago Press
Read an excerpt from Zeppo’s First Wife.
Read an excerpt from They Can’t Take That Away From Me.
Read an excerpt from The Common.