Loads of Learned Lumber

Monday, June 2, 2014

Rachel Zucker, _The Pedestrians_

I WROTE A review of this for a (much) more reputable website, and that review is scheduled to pop up some time this summer, so rather than risk scooping myself I will say here simply that I feel I should be reading more Rachel Zucker. I had already read the collaborative book she wrote with Arielle Greenberg on home birth, which gave me one idea about her. The first half of The Pedestrians is a sustained almost-narrative-poem-in-prose on the difficulties of marriage, so spare and precise that it feels like the bones of the bones of a novel, which gave me a completely different idea of her.  The second half is a series of poems set mainly in New York City, as pop-eyed and loquacious as a Long Island housewife on really, really good diet pills...giving me yet another idea of her. Rachel Zucker contains multitudes. I need to find some more.

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