No Bullshit.​​Just Books.
  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • The Buzz
    • Our Authors
  • Contact
    • Guidelines
    • Editorial

Art Zilleruelo

6/5/2017

 
Picture
Art Zilleruelo’s poetry has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Western Humanities Review, James Dickey Review, and other journals. Kattywompus Press published his chapbook Weird Vocation in 2015. His poetry has been anthologized in Lost Horse Press’s Of a Monstrous Child: An Anthology of Creative Writing Relationships. His critical work appears in Joyce Studies Annual and The Canterbury Tales Revisited: 21st Century Interpretations.
Picture
Art Zilleruelo’s "The Last Map" explores language’s role as the mediator between humanity and nature. Combining a deep reverence for the power of language with profound anxieties about language’s tendency to contaminate that which it represents, these poems reside between the impulse to succumb to the seductive qualities of words and the drive to penetrate through words into the unmediated world. Narrative modes ranging from history to mythology, from folklore to family legends, and from cosmology to apocalyptic eschatology are simultaneously exploited for their aesthetic potency and subjected to skeptical internal critique. Each poem engages ongoing human efforts to manage and articulate encounters with the radical otherness and uncanny familiarity of the natural world. The interpenetration of humanity and nature is revealed as both exhilarating and terrifying, and, as the cumulative effects of these encounters proliferate, the contact between these two worlds becomes increasingly fraught with complications for both. As the personae that populate these poems struggle with nature within and nature without, they come to question conventional ways of understanding themselves, their relationships, and their values. They consequently begin to perceive a new world ripe with strange possibilities, a world that all of their maps, both literal and figurative, seem ill-equipped to describe. Zilleruelo's poems display a deep commitment to pursuing poetry’s aesthetic dimensions. His disciplined, musical free verse reminds readers that poems are more than mere ideas meant to be interpreted--they are also aesthetic artifacts intended to be experienced.

What People Are Saying....

The Last Map is a spiritual journey that transcends our own minuscule limitations.  Imagine putting on the lenses by which the poet Zilleruelo sees the world, and the reader finds a place full of unexpected treasure.  While not afraid of the darkness, this collection makes a “livable fiction” of light, and the “long liquid fibers” a movable path for the eye and the spirit, a confirmation of magic—dragons and vines and worms.  With a generosity sometimes rare in poetry, Zilleruelo invites us to traverse the darkness of the human spirit unafraid, often expressing what we’ve all desired: “light enough to lead us in through the verge… where the good kindling hid.”  This is not a denial of evil, but rather a calm acceptance that where there is shadow, there can also be spark.  Each new reading has rendered a new discovery in this landscape, another acknowledgement of this painful duality.  And as seasons shift and change, so do the shadows shift.  May we all be such fertile ground where we “bleed new greens into the grass.”

​--- April Pameticky

What sticks with me when reading The Last Map is Zilleruelo's bridging of the natural world to what I'd call some kind of transcendental or spiritual realm, where one finds an appreciation for those things tangible and real. Poems like "Vines" and "Other Fires" stick out for their measured language and their invitations to readers to investigate not only the world around them but the soul within all things. Elsewhere, Zilleruelo reflects on the burdens of generations in the masterful centerpiece, "The Pipe-Tree," a poem of great depth and honesty, and amongst a great many stunning lines, he concludes the collection with some of my favorite:

 Have you ever felt
your heart match the second hand?
They breathe together a moment,
then divorce.

If my breath is the first to break,
I’ll wait for you at the lake,
and meet you where the leaves put down their stain.
​

 Kinnell once wrote: "I long for the mantle/of the great wanderers, who lighted/ their steps by the lamp/ of pure hunger and pure thirst,/ and whichever way they lurched was the way."
 With the The Last Map, Zilleruelo embarks on a similar quest, and the results are frequently stunning and always inspiring.
  ---Brian Seemann

Comments are closed.

    Authors

    All
    Adela Najarro
    Adrian Ernesto Cepeda
    Alison Hicks
    Amanda Williams
    Ani Manjikian
    Anne Babson
    Anne Leigh Parrish
    Bill Rector
    Brian Looney
    Cara Long
    Chris Viner
    Darci Schummer
    David M. Harris
    David Wasserman
    Dominic Mann-Bertrand
    Doug S. Haines
    Eleanor Levine
    Emily Kiernan
    Francis Daulerio
    Gemma Cooper-Novack
    Jeffery J. Bartone
    Jerrod E. Bohn
    John Biscello
    Kevin McCoy
    Lemniscate
    LL Holt
    Marilyn Katz
    Mark Belair
    Megan Dhakshini
    Michael Overa
    Mick Bennett
    Nicholas Kriefall
    Ohan Hominis
    Pamela Herron
    Poetry
    Rebecca Watkins
    Robert Knox
    Roger Aplon
    Sam Love
    Sandy Coomer
    Savannah Stewart
    Scott Alexander Jones
    S.R. Stewart
    Steve Levine
    Steven Charnow
    Susan P. Robbins
    Timothy O'Leary
    William Alton

In a nutshell

About Unsolicited Press
Books
Submission Guidelines
The Buzz
Editorial Services
Advertising

Employment
Contact Us
Picture
Writer Guidelines
Subscribe
  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • The Buzz
    • Our Authors
  • Contact
    • Guidelines
    • Editorial
✕