Soundmachine - by Rachel Zucker (Paperback)

About the Book

Zucker sweeps all the corners in this maximalist project of poems and prose navigating love, loss, and personal and political despair.

Book Synopsis

Through heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, Rachel Zucker trains her relentless attention on marriage, motherhood, grief, the need to speak, depression, sex, and many other topics. Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay--and not limited by any of these categories--SoundMachine is a book written out of the persistent feeling that the human voice is both a meaningless sound and the only way we know we exist.

Review Quotes

"Zucker's namenaming, carping, merciless, and gloriously human body of work thus far suggests that any full account of being an individual has to register how specimen-like and interchangeable our lives often seem."--Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"Zucker is a poet of bottom-scraping, blood-chilling existential anxiety, one among many, and a poet of New York City, one among many, and a poet of American Jewish inheritance, one among many, and one of the funniest, too . . . "--Steph Burt, The Boston Review

"Rachel Zucker is a courageous poet. Not because she dodges bullets in a war zone (though I bet she would), or because she yells outlandish things on cable TV (I bet she'd do that, too), but because she writes poetry in a way that interrogates what it means to tell the truth."--Travis Nichols, The Huffington Post

"Zucker is about the only contemporary poet I've read who manages to address [motherhood] without sounding coy and cloying. Mothers should read, others can learn."--Library Journal

"By sharing experience through interrogating and dynamic language, Zucker shines light on how we can live honestly against the grain of expected feeling and attitude and how we might feel powerful and passionate in a time of terror and fear."--American Poet

"Zucker's not interested in making readers see anything 'as if for the first time.' She's here to remind us how much there is to see in what we've seen before."--Chicago Tribune

"SoundMachine's immediacy and urgency make reading it an imperative."--Katie Berta, Ploughshares

"Artfully layered . . . these pieces defy genre and interrogate the role of wife, mother, and artist as fixed identities. . . . Zucker renders even the simplest inquiries--such as 'hasn't anyone tried to stop this?--resonant and profound in this restless and thoughtful book."-- starred review, Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Rachel Zucker is the author of many books, including SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019), The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014), and Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the co-author (with Arielle Greenberg) of the nonfiction title Home/birth: a poemic and co-editor (also with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Zucker currently teaches poetry at NYU. In 2016 she was a Bagley Wright Lecturer and wrote and delivered a series of talks on poetry, photography, confessionalism, motherhood, and the ethics of representing real people in art. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship in 2016, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center in 2018. Zucker lives in NYC with her husband and three sons.