The Zoo

Winner of the 2000 Associated Writing Programs' Award in PoetrySelected by Li-Young LeeJoanie Mackowski's debut collection of poetry is meditative, vivid, sometimes weird. Turning an idiosyncratic eye to the inhabitants of zoos and fish tanks, cafes and cemeteries, she illuminates details that make the familiar seem strange. An egret stands "still as a glass of milk"; iceberg lettuce is a "vegetable leviathan" that "extends beneath the dinner table / an unseen, monstrous green"; a bald eagle may "love a jet?— / or worship them all, or mock them, rigid / freaks that never linger."An insistent musicality fills these poems, whether asking, "Ailing, alien, alone, / are you ill in your ear or in error?" exhorting, "Remember the Alamo, remember Armageddon, / remember the mustard and chard in your garden," or reflecting, "one does wonder what one does wonder one does." Mackowski's practical metaphysics and desperate wit puzzle the boundary between essence and ornament, revelation and disguise, reason and the loss of it.