Monkey Lightning

$19.95

by Martha Zweig

Martha Zweig’s fourth collection of poems is her strongest. With a voice and verbal texture like no other contemporary poet’s, she transfigures the sonorous traditional English lyric with an audacity that’s rugged and unruly but sublimely literary. Zweig’s etymological wizardry recalls the intoxicating word-play of the rustics and faeries in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet in their dramatic candor, Zweig’s new poems are also as bull’s-eye direct as John Berryman’s blues-drenched Dream Songs. From the howling, buzzing, frosty reaches of the north woods we bring you… Monkey Lightning! The best work yet by a virtuoso conjuror.

by Martha Zweig

Martha Zweig’s fourth collection of poems is her strongest. With a voice and verbal texture like no other contemporary poet’s, she transfigures the sonorous traditional English lyric with an audacity that’s rugged and unruly but sublimely literary. Zweig’s etymological wizardry recalls the intoxicating word-play of the rustics and faeries in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet in their dramatic candor, Zweig’s new poems are also as bull’s-eye direct as John Berryman’s blues-drenched Dream Songs. From the howling, buzzing, frosty reaches of the north woods we bring you… Monkey Lightning! The best work yet by a virtuoso conjuror.

About the Author

Participant in the semi-revolutionary turmoil of the 1960s, Martha Zweig worked for a decade in the garment industry at Concord Manufacturing in Morrisville, Vermont, including a term as shop chair for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and another ten years as an advocate for seniors in northern Vermont, where she has lived since 1974. Zweig received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1999, and her poems have been published in many of the nation’s leading literary and political journals, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Field, The Boston Review, The Progressive, The Kenyon Review, and Sojourner. Zweig’s previous books include Vinegar Bone and What Kind (Wesleyan, 1999 and 2003). Currently she volunteers for North Country Animal League and for Restorative Justice, a community organization promoting a post-police process based on the ‘truth and reconcilation’ approach developed in South Africa.

Advanced Praise

“At her most delicious, Zweig serves a poetry of forks, of mixed metaphors, and divergent definitions. She claims to be ‘meek as you-know. Me, reportedly,’ but when it comes to overhauling idioms, she’s nothing of the sort: is that line claiming she’s ‘meek, as you know’? Is it sarcastically insisting ‘you know me, reportedly’? When fostering such confusions — slowing our reading to a grand-still — Zweig seems like the ‘bee’s news,’ her work an electrifying ‘ringling & brotherly-circuits.’” —Abigail Deutsch, Poetry

“What do you get when you cross Flannery O’Connor with Gerard Manley Hopkins? Something sprung of rhythm, fierce of feeling, dappled down and doubled over, whistled out of terror and intelligence. Welcome to the work of Martha Zweig.” —Heather McHugh

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-82-8