The Zoo at Night (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Susan Gubernat

$17.95

Publication Date: September 1st, 2017

Publisher:

University of Nebraska Press

ISBN:

9781496202055

Pages:

114

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Description

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Gubernat’s The Zoo at Night reflects with subtle craft on the dark side of love, death, the family romance, carnality, and lofty aspirations. She thinks of her poems as “night thoughts” resembling nocturnes, in which “a bit of light leaks in.”

Both experimental and classic, Gubernat’s poems combine formal and free verse elements. A (mostly) unrhymed sonnet sequence seeks to recall the world of a pre-digital childhood when physical objects—tactile, mechanical—took on totemic import and magical significance. Other poems echo the Rilkean principle that poetry can be empathetic by looking outward at the “thingness” of the world.

In these works of love and longing, Gubernat enters through the doors of craft and exits with feeling.

About the Author

Susan Gubernat is a professor of English at California State University, East Bay. She is the author of Flesh, winner of the Marianne Moore Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Analog House. An opera librettist, her major work, Korczak’s Orphans, in collaboration with composer Adam Silverman, has been performed in a number of venues. She lives in Oakland, California.

Praise for The Zoo at Night (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

"Rising out of experience—painful, beautiful, disruptive—The Zoo at Night offers an unflinching look at an imperfect world underlain with a conviction to hope."—Lisa Higgs, Kenyon Review

“‘Beauty is always strange,’ says Baudelaire, and in Susan Gubernat’s brilliant The Zoo at Night, we have a grand tour of the many ways that the world, arriving directly under our noses, can remain, everlastingly, embodied and mysterious.”—Mark Svenvold, author of Empire Burlesque and Big Weather

“For those of us who believe in words—their merit as instruments of inquiry, their aptitude for beauty, their power of linking soul to soul—these are difficult times. Open these pages, and find your hope restored. Susan Gubernat’s are poems of meticulous craftsmanship, luminous apprehension, and unfailing heart. I’m grateful beyond measure for this book.”—Linda Gregerson, author of Magnetic North, finalist for the National Book Award