The Pedestrians - Paperback

by Rachel Zucker (Author)

"Zucker is a poet of bottom-scraping, blood-chilling existential anxiety, one among many, and a poet of New York City, one among many, and a poet of American Jewish inheritance, one among many, and one of the funniest, too."--Boston Review

Rachel Zucker returns to themes of motherhood, marriage, and the life of an artist in this double collection of poems. Fables, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. The Pedestrians brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations.

That Great Diaspora

I'll never leave New York & when I do
I too will be unbodied--what? you
imagine I might transmogrify? I'm from
nowhere which means here & so wade out
into the briny dream of elsewheres like
a released dybbyk but can't stand
the soulessness now everyone who ever
made sense to me has died & everyone I love
grows from my body like limbs on a rootless tree

Rachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife, The Last Clear Narrative, Eating in the Underworld, and Annunciation.

Author Biography

Rachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan University, 2007), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan University, 2004), Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan University, 2003), and Annunciation (The Center for Book Arts, 2002), as well as the co-editor (with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). She is co-author (also with Arielle Greenberg) of Home/birth: a poemic, a nonfiction book about birth, friendship, and feminism. Her memoir, MOTHERs, will be published by Counterpath Press in 2013. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Zucker teaches at NYU and the 92nd Street Y. She currently lives in NYC with her husband and three sons and was awarded an National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012.