Aleksander Zywicki
Aleksander Zywicki was raised in Bayonne, New Jersey. He is the author of ZOUNDS! (selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2024 Barrow Street Book Prize). Aleks received an MFA from the New School and his work appears (or is forthcoming) in: Plume, Gulf Coast, Laurel Review, Seneca Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hunger Mountain, Bear Review, Shō Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He’s received a poetry fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and a teaching fellowship by the Folger Shakespeare Library. He teaches English at The Hudson School in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Poems
Praise for ZOUNDS!
“What a thrill it has been to come upon this book. Aleksander Zywicki’s sensibility—his off-kilter rhythms, his surprising collisions of image and sound, the many ways these poems snap closed at their ends—is brilliant and utterly original. In ZOUNDS! Zywicki meditates on the vagaries of memory and the divine, the certainties of mortality, and the complexities of living among other complex, often unreachable people. Always at work in these poems is a keen, scalpel-like intelligence slicing away in search of something like truth. And always present, too, is that musician’s sense of song that lives inside language. This is a formidable debut.”
— Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears
“In a voice as steady and incantatory as prayer, the spare, penetrating poems of Aleks Zywicki’s ZOUNDS! unfold down their pages. These are meditations on a complicated grief, and the casual cruelties and disappointments of being human—those that find us, and those we make of ourselves. But even as the voice edges toward the stoic, it softens with a warm reverence for life’s modest joys, and the strange wonder that is our life on earth. Turning from one object of devotion to the next—family, god, love, labor, the natural world—these poems tunnel to the heart of faith’s lonely edifice, searching, earnestly, for something worth believing in.
— Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses
“Aleksander Zywicki’s arresting debut sweeps like a lighthouse beam across the jagged surfaces of a life. The tumbling, mostly unpunctuated lines of ZOUNDS! evoke the slipperiness of memory whilestill feeling tethered to a stark present: “suddenly it is the hour / when god is peeled from your tongue.” While death, family dysfunction, and lapsed faith are foundational to much of this collection (“chaos gathers each night / into the ghost of my father”), they are countered by a sense of hope as the poet builds a future with his wife and young daughter. These restless, bracingly intelligent poems seem to recognize that it is not necessarily their job to make sense of the world, yet in mysterious and unexpected ways, they do.”
— Mark Bibbins, author of 13th Balloon
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