Martha Zweig Selected Works

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 wordplay of the rustics and faeries in Shakespeare's 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.

Early chapbook by Zweig.

Vinegar Bone, the first full-length collection by Martha Zweig, reveals the world in strange but startlingly apt images. Intelligent, salty, full of extraordinary imagination and linguistic texture, these poems delve deep into the meanings of winter mornings, early peas, rocks, stars, the deaths of animals, and the death of love. A single mother and former factory worker, Zweig is no stranger to hard times. Her poems are precise, original, and moving. Whether she is uncovering the similarities between a cave and a kiss or meditating on murder, Zweig's love of language is exceed only by her taste for truth.

Drawing on fairy tales and imbued with an almost antique diction, What Kind uses wit and word play to approach the thorn-ridden thicket of family, memory, sex and belonging. Many of the poems seem to speak uncannily from a child’s perspective—a child seeking solace in relationships with animals and other creatures both real and imaginary. Many poets concern themselves with country matters and mortal mechanisms, but Martha Zweig alone hatches them out of language itself. She is an exquisite analyst of colloquialism, and the syntactical precisions at work within her old New England parlances are uncommonly refined. This book follows Zweig’s brilliant debut collection Vinegar Bone, hailed by Publishers Weekly as a "unique blend of scary folktale imagery, American plain speech and a planed-down formalism."