Works by
Rachel Zucker
(Poet)
[1971 - ]

Poetry

• Museum of Accidents (2009)
  Rending the terrorizing forces of modern existence from abstraction and placing them directly in our laps, Museum of Accidents is a brutally honest epic of domestic proportions.

• The Bad Wife Handbook (2007)
  Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

• The Last Clear Narrative (2004)
  In her second collection of poems, Rachel Zucker returns to a more autobiographical stance and writes about the particulars of marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood--experiences that radically surprised her. But this is no simple reportage. With candor, humor, and compassion, Zucker discovers a new poetic territory: a landscape between story and fragment, a way of telling that is neither confessional nor intellectually detached. At the cliff-edge of narrative, a high place where language is the rope and falling the perception, Zucker's poems are unsentimental, true to the disjunctive experiences of loving, giving birth, raising a child, being lonely, being alive. A poetry of the body, of desire, about human frailty and strength, The Last Clear Narrative fills a void in the history of women writing about everyday experience and speaks to the nature of narrative itself.

• Eating in the Underworld (2003)
  Poems using the Persephone myth to explore the life of a contemporary woman.

• Annunciation (Date?)
  Annunciation is a poem in 19 sections. The poem travels from Florence (Italy) to New York to Kansas City to Nova Scotia and considers motherhood, sex, the Virgin Mary, pregnancy, and the body. In 2002 Annunciation was chosen by Sharon Dolin and Lynn Emanuel as the winner of the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. One hundred letter press chapbooks were designed and printed by book artist Roni Gross.

Other

• Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (2008),  Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker, eds.
  Imagine being a young poet, nurturing your craft without the benefit of established mentors. Imagine having never been in a class taught by a woman poet or not having a bookshelf filled with books written by living women poets. Luckily, young women poets today don’t have to. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker’s Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections collects both personal essays and representative poems by women born after 1960 whose careers were influenced—directly or indirectly—by the women who preceded them.
  
  The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women’s poetry.