RACHEL ZUCKER
Rachel Zucker was born in New York City in 1971 and raised in the landscape of Greenwich Village when not traveling around the world with her parents on Wolkstein's folktale-collecting trips (her mother was a folk-story teller and her father, a novelist). After graduating from Yale with a B.A. in Psychology, Zucker attended the University of Iowa where she received her M.F.A in poetry. Zucker has taught at Yale, NYU and Makor. From 2005-2007 she was the poet-in-residence at Fordham University where she taught writing and literature classes to undergraduate and graduate students.
Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, (with Arielle Greenberg). 2008
The Bad Wife Handbook, 2007
The Last Clear Narrative, 2004
Eating in the Underworld, 2003
A Chapbook:
Annunciation, 2002
Contributions to several anthologies of both poetry and prose:
Not for Mothers Only, 2007
Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, 2007
Legitimate Dangers, 2006
Poetry 30: Thirty-Something Thirty-Something American Poets, 2005
Isn’t It Romantic, 2004
The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, 2004
Best American Poetry 2001
About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing and Hope, 2006
(Not to mention a laundry list of journals to which she has contributed.)
She is currently working on her fourth collection of poems, Museum of Accidents, which will be published by Wave Books in 2009, and a novel for which she provides little information.
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REVIEWS
"Zucker has the confessionalist's knack for turning personal and difficult into universal and transcendent, and the experimentalist's gift for fearless, associative play. The combination is unsettling and groundbreaking: a vitally necessary book for our age."
-Arielle Greenberg, author of My Kafka Century
"The poems in The Last Clear Narrative find a path to the unspeakable. By way of a fractured narrative, Rachel Zucker painstakingly documents death and birth, taking us deep into the experiences of that 'stubborn body.' The Last Clear Narrative seeks, and finds, a remarkable language the body can speak." -Elisabeth Frost, author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry
THE MOON HAS A REPUTATION
FOR BEING FICKLE by Rachel Zucker
I read the instructions twice and pee on my hand by mistake.
I wait.
I try again and then, in the 2 minutes 15 seconds it takes to get the first response
I watch Ponch deliver a baby in a trailer the CHiPs pulled over for speeding.
The woman's screaming.
Ponch pours water from a canteen over his hands and kneels between her legs.
Thirty-five seconds later he emerges from the trailer, pulls on black leather
riding gloves, there's no blood, and
one pink bar
on the plastic view screen.
