Zachary Schomburg

Poetry. SCARY, NO SCARY, the follow-up to Zachary Schomburg's acclaimed first collection of poems THE MAN SUIT, is a book of skeleton gloves and skeleton keys at once dark and playful. With loneliness and levity Schomburg takes the reader on a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own myth and folklore. Here there are new kinds of trees and new ways of naming the ages; jaguars and an abandoned hotel on the horizon. This book will crawl inside your chest and pump lava through your blood."

Scary, No Scary

The man suit

Poems, some previously published in a chapbook, or journals and websites.

Fjords

The people of Pie Time are suffering from God's Finger, a mysterious plague that leaves its victims dead with a big hole through their chests. In each hole is a random consumer product. Mano Medium, a sensitive, young cigarette-factory worker in love, does his part by quitting the factory to work double-time as Pie Time's replacement barber and butcher, and by holding the things found in the holes of the newly dead. However, the more people die, the bigger Mano becomes. XO, the power-hungry corporation bent on overtaking Pie Time, and Father Mothers, the bumbling priest, have their own ideas about how to capitalize on God's Finger. By contrast, and powered by honoring his own lost loves, Mano fights to resist this exploitation by teaching death to those who can't afford to survive it. As Pie Time and Mano both grow irrevocably, Mano must make a decision about how he can best fit into his own life. With a large cast of unusual characters, each struggling with their own complex and tangled relationships to death, money, and love, Mammother is a fabulist's tale of how we hold on and how we let go in a rapidly growing world.

Mammother

Pulver Maar

From the Fjords

Poetry. THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgängers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow. "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.... Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around."--Publishers Weekly "Zachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other."--James Tate "Zachary Schomburg's THE MAN SUIT comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days."--Matthew Rohrer "It is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, René Char and Pablo Neruda come most vividly to mind in this regard. With THE MAN SUIT, Zachary Schomburg, quietly but with deep conviction, begins to join their company. His book is a blessing."--Donald Revell

The Man Suit

Poetry. Zachary schomburg has delivered his latest work from a dark place, where little machines repeat in a hollow voice, "this is only further proof of your badness." presented in a single narrative, THE BOOK OF JOSHUA is a sorry heart begged out of dreams, death & a horse's eye. It is an epic journey not only affirming that "there is a difference between sadness and suffering," but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. THE BOOK OF JOSHUA calls out in hunger and loneliness, "I didn't feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore."

Zachary Schomburg

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