On ‘Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia’ by...
The Bay Area was a groundswell for experiments in communal living during the 1960s and ’70s. Few would associate the utopian spirit of those projects, which were often motivated by the desire to leave...
View ArticleLife Without a Narrator: Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection
Popular novels about the internet tend to deride, explicitly or not, a certain perceived generational disaffectedness. “We don’t want to do anything challenging, such as what living requires,” declares...
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Sharing Strange Ghosts: Reflections on Jack Spicer at Berkeley
It felt very fitting to launch Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters at Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2025) at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall.The campus was a key location for the California...
View ArticleCanon Wars Redux: On Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?
Taste, Naomi Kanakia explains, is one facet of how Great Books shape us. Our ability to appreciate great literature, to “discriminate, to discern fine nuances, and to see what truly exists within an...
View ArticleA Map of Desire: Thomas Dai’s Take My Name but Say It Slow: Essays
In Thomas Dai’s essay collection Take My Name but Say It Slow (288 pages; Norton), Dai crafts deeply contemplative meditations on growing up Chinese American and navigating queer identity. The diptych...
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Inventing a Joan: Q&A With Jake Rose
One poem in Jake Rose’s debut collection JOAN, which was published in April,reads: “sometimes a metaphysical door opens and you just have to / gawk and that’s when your mouth gets wide enough / to...
View ArticleIssue No. 132
Nonfiction“Saguaro in the Sea” by Sophia Acuña: on surfing and indigeneity in Southern California, toldthrough collage.“Care Directive” by Sarah Matsui: a daughter’s attempt to keep her aging father in...
View ArticleRestored to Flight: Fifty Mothers by Preeti Vangani
Preeti Vangani’s searing, sharp Fifty Mothers (67 pages; River River Books) captures the essence of grieving a parent. The linked poems in the collection reach for emotional highs and nadirs; rage...
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Working Fires: A Look Inside the Life of Hotshots
In 2025, wildfires again broke records. The year began with the Eaton and Palisades fires, and over the course of the year, ten thousand more wildfires burned than the ten-year average. We live in a...
View ArticleAfter the Quake: Q&A with Nadia Terranova
The author of acclaimed novels that have been translated into many languages, Nadia Terranova is one of the most prominent voices of contemporary Italian literature. In 2020, her first novel translated...
View ArticleA Poetics of Survival: On Richard Siken’s ‘Crush’ and ‘I Do Know Some Things’
Richard Siken can’t help but love you. Supported by the scaffolding of the camera and the director’s chair, Crush, the author’s 2005 collection—selected by Louise Glück for the 2004 Yale Series of...
View ArticleRemembering Analogically: ‘Analog Days’ by Damion Searls
One day in June, the narrator of Damion Searls’s debut novella, Analog Days (120 pages; Coffee House Press), steps away from the narrative, allowing ambient coffee-shop dialogue to populate the pages:...
View ArticleAn Ordinary Kind of Romance: ‘New Paltz, New Paltz’ by Mike Powell
One day, Ben takes his lunch break at the museum across the street from his office. He asks a woman at the ticket desk about free admission; he’s been informed that the magazine he works for is a...
View ArticleVocabulary Lesson: ‘Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters...
“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,’’ Jack Spicer wrote in “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.’’ The brilliant, troubled figure identified with the Berkeley Renaissance—a coterie of fellow...
View ArticleJack Spicer’s California: From The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer (1925–1965) was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Spicer’s radical theories of authorship and poetic dictation influenced a generation of poets, and they continue to resonate...
View ArticleIssue No. 131
Nonfiction“The Fighters” by Joe Donnelly: on being transplanted as a boy from New Jersey to Ireland, and the grim school days spent at Willow Park primary school in Dublin. “Fire Watching” by Harmony...
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“A book is not interesting to me until it’s impossible for me to write”: Q&A...
A chapter from Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist appeared in the very first issue of ZYZZYVA in 1985. It’s the chapter where Bob, Glück’s avatar and the novel’s narrator, leaves Jack, his lover, in bed...
View ArticleEver the Same: Bernadette Mayer’s ‘The Golden Book of Words’
Originally published in 1978, the late Bernadette Mayer’s poetry collection The Golden Book of Words is available again from New Directions, reissued with the gorgeous original cover design by Joe...
View ArticleWhere to Find Us
Writing About Wildfire2 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 11 Fairfax Library2097 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., FairfaxAs California residents, the crackling threat of wildfire forms a constant background to our lives...
View ArticleIssue No. 130
Nonfiction“Budgeting the Shark” by Tom Bissell: on the adaptation of Jaws from a best-selling novel (that might make you want to root for the shark) to a blockbuster movie celebrating its 50th...
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