Often You Light a Fuse to Prove You Won't Explode - by Corey Zeller (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Written over the course of the author's life with his late partner, Often You Light a Fuse to Prove You Won't Explode is as much a love letter to her as to the inevitable tragedy of two people's lost American dream. Zeller--one of his generation's leading prose poets--uses other writers' lines as a springboard to dive into themes of death, doomscrolling, addiction, incarceration, and ordering takeout while the world erupts around us. As the title suggests, this collection is a fuse in search of a fire, burning for history, survival, family, and longing for unconditional love.

Review Quotes

"Corey Zeller's process in Often You Light a Fuse to Prove You Won't Explode is a high-powered imaginative spill, ekphrastic and pop cultural, replete with stories, researched and personal, and thick with romance, both lost and found. In these compressed prose poems, Zeller proves himself to be a king of figuration, especially the simile. The sun sets itself on fire like Richard Pryor. The 'fog peels over a mountain like your grandmother peeling a Vidalia onion...' The speaker has 'lived like...smoke rings from a rich girl's mouth.' Indeed, it is a this is like that world; the atmosphere is that of the transition from singular hallucination to iterations, in memes, on the internet. The grief billows. It is also ironic, absurd. A man self-immolates outside the Israeli embassy in D.C. in the same poem in which a candlelight vigil is held 'outside the last remaining Hooters in the state of West Virginia.' Apocalypse is global, but also intimate, even erotic. The book's setting is filled with windows and doors, opening and then closing for good, 'things packed away in boxes; boxes taped as tight as a hostage's mouth.' Zeller interlaces literary allusions throughout the poems. They are synonymous with its landscape: from Ada Limón to Hanif Abdurraqib to Joy Harjo. We experience, in this weaving-in, what it sounds and feels like to be immersed in poems, to live a life inseparable from them, and that poems, for Zeller, are a push-back against the breakdown of language in the end times." --Diane Seuss author of frank: sonnets (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

"I keep thinking about the lucky audience who first hears these lines aloud. The same lucky audience who first hears Corey Zeller's dazzling lines as capacious allegories, capricious fables, and poetic parables will later discover paragraphs laced with pearls and bangers, ghost koans and buried haiku. Maybe I'm projecting the exhilaration I felt myself, coasting along this river of scenarios and songs, but the sensation is real and persistent. I first started seeing centos in Zeller's table of contents, then throughout the passages: gems of insight. And later still, the lines linger the way a good friend's voice does. As I read, I kept thinking of Detroit-Phil Levine's narrative chops and karate chops; Patricia Smith's vernacular dexterity and verbal verve; even Russell Edson lurking at the edges? Part Bashō haibun, part panting engine block, part buried guitar, part spider web strung with tiny bells, Often You Light a Fuse to Prove You Won't Explode merges looseness and pointedness, tradition and weirdness, into a distinctly Zeller form: at once a great first read and a guaranteed rereadable feast." --Terrance Hayes author of Lighthead (winner of the National Book Award for Poetry)

"A master of the prose poem, Zeller has come back from the world we can't see to the world we survive and thrive within armed with poems no less powerful, no less magnificent, and stunning for how human they shine." --Danez Smith, author of Bluff (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)

"Though most of these poems take their titles from other poets, Corey Zeller is equally adept at channeling Sam Kinison and Shane McGowan as Roethke and Tranströmer. Able to pull meaning from seemingly anywhere and anything--love and loss, Alien and the sad whales of SeaWorld--these dynamic poems slingshot out into the world, a world that "seems to open and spill out onto itself," and they bring the reader back an Art that's full of wisdom from the hard-earned broken beauty of a life fully lived." --Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines and Constellation Route

About the Author

Corey Zeller is the author of Often You Light a Fuse to Prove You Won't Explode (Boa Editions, 2027) and three other poetry collections. His work has been published in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, PEN America, Alaska Quarterly Review, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, The Cincinnati Review, among many others. He received his MFA from Syracuse University.