The Zoo

by Joanie Mackowski

Overview

Joanie Mackowski’s debut collection of poetry is meditative, vivid, sometimes weird. Turning an idiosyncratic eye to the inhabitants of zoos and fish tanks, cafes and cemeteries, she illuminates details that make the familiar seem strange. An egret stands "still as a glass of milk"; iceberg lettuce is a "vegetable leviathan" that "extends beneath the dinner table / an unseen, monstrous green"; a bald eagle may "love a jet?—  / or worship them all, or mock them, rigid / freaks that never linger."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822957683
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	12/06/2001
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Joanie Mackowski is assistant professor of English at Cornell University and author of the poetry collection The Zoo. Her awards include the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Grant, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Mackowski's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2007 and 2009, the Yale Review, Poetry, the American Scholar, New England Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, the Kenyon Review, and other journals.

What People are Saying About This

Sherod Santos

With their extravagant range of formal skills and their clairvoyant gift for seeing ‘into the life of things,’ Joanie Mackowski’s poems serve to elevate into music the whole comedy of human consciousness, its wonders and afflictions, its triumphs and grim confusions, its love and boundless appetite for (to borrow her phrase) the world’s ‘unpredictable teachings.’ Whereas first books are often timid and eager to please, The Zoo speaks with the self-assurance of someone whose vital element is a delight in the sweet materiality of language. In an ideal age, the term ‘true poet’ would be reserved for someone who writes like this.

Editorial Reviews

. . . her first collection . . . is a high-spirited survey of our peculiar species, often with parallel glances at other animals . . . Mackowski’s wit stands her in good stead . . . She has talent to burn . . .”
—Poetry Magazine


“. . . gaze is superseded by sharp observation that yields vivid visual imagery and invites immersion. . . . Mackowski’s rhymes, myriad and ingenious, are one of the most impressive features of The Zoo.”
—The Yale Review

“A virtuoso performance. . . .Contains many delightful surprises and not a few ideas worth considering.”

—Antioch Review

From the Publisher

Whether watching colorful fish in the aquarium in a psychiatrist's waiting room or the people who "sit and sit and talk, all they do is lovely," Mackowski takes a close look at beasts, birds, and insects as well as strangers, neighbors, and herself. The vivid meditations in this debut collection can take strange turns and reveal the often unnoticed world around us. Ants are "`social creatures,' yet what grim/ society: identical pilgrims,/ seed-like, brittle." In skilled plays of chiming sounds and surprising rhythms, and with a delightful respect for precision and clarity, Mackowski lifts the invisible curtains from the zoo: "The egret stands still as a glass of milk/ by the lagoon"; "fifty pelicans/ rise, fly circles, dive each angular/ as origami, newspaper-colored"; "a man pushed his plate away while fifty angels pull the waitress hums a tune off key and stakes a plate with apples." As Mackowski makes clear, Earth is a wonderland all we have to do is look around. This is a smart and fascinating volume. Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal