Museum of Accidents

by Rachel Zucker

Overview

"Rachel Zucker may be Generation X's likeliest heir to the confessional legacy of Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds."— The Believer

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.

Rachel Zucker is the author of three collections of poetry and co-editor of Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections . A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she currently lives in New York City with her husband and three sons, where she is a certified labor doula.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933517421
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	10/01/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	82
Sales rank:	324,009
Product dimensions:	8.48(w) x 8.58(h) x 0.29(d)

About the Author

Rachel Zucker is the author of three collections of poetry and co-editor of Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Zucker has taught at several institutions, including NYU and Yale. She currently lives in NYC with her husband and three sons, and is a certified labor doula.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Previous Work: "Rachel Zucker may be Generation X's likeliest heir to the confessional legacy of Sylvia Plath, Louise Gluck, and Sharon Olds. At her best, she matches desperate, pained self-revelation with breakneck lines that spill in and out of long-lined verse and writhing prose." -The Believer

From the Publisher

Getting married and having children does result in a lot of accidents, and Zucker—author of scintillating The Bad Wife Handbook—is exactly the poet to record them. Zucker uses energetic, brightly caustic wordplay as she crisscrosses life's little jumbles, leaving the reader as "split shocked shattered" as she is herself. This isn't a rose-tinted look at life with family; it's the real thing.

Library Journal

This forth collection of poems by Zucker (The Bad Wife Handbook) furthers her project to portray the dark underside of marriage and parenthood in 16 mostly long poems that are as formally wild as they are self-conscious and emotionally searing. Zucker's subject is not an unhappy marriage, but an average one, which, she wants to make clear, is full of as much pain, fear, lust and hopelessness as the fabled unions of some of her confessional forebears. There is happiness, too, but that's not the province of this book, in which romance can be reduced to a formula (“Thursday: we have sex (husband and I) lights on”), and a poem recounts how an audience member at a poetry reading says, after hearing the author read about her young son, “Someday, he'll grow up and read that and you'll pay.” In another, a fellow poet advises “the next time you feel yourself going dark/ in a poem, just don't, and see what happens,” yielding one of the oddest “happy” poems around. Zucker's willingness to put her own pain on display may frighten or even disgust some readers, but most will be grateful to find themselves less alone in their own everyday suffering. This is a book for all who seek what Zucker calls “the antidote for despair,” however elusive it may be. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly