Paul Zimmer

Paul Zimmer lives on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin. In the fifteen years since his retirement from a long career in university publishing, he has published two books each of poetry and essay-memoir. His first novel, The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove, is forthcoming from Permanent Press in early 2015, when he will be eighty years old—which surely makes him, he believes, one of the oldest first novelists ever.

Zimmer to His Students

Skywriters & Zimmer Closes His Family Home

Zimmer to His Students

Wounds

But Bird

The Books

Before the Moon Came Up Last Night

Old Gus labors alone

Howdy Duncan

The Summer of the Comet

The Blind World, Atomic Battlefields

Once I Was a Block of Stone: Six Recent Chapbooks (on Epic Journeys, Unbelievable Escapes by Steve Kowit; A Different Kind of Hunger by Beth Ann Fennelly; Take Hold by Merrill Leffler; The Memory Palace by Colin Hamilton; Hand-Me-down Calicos by L. Teresa Church; and At The Dead Center of Day by Walter Bargen)

“Bursting Under the Window, Inconsolable”: Five Recent Chapbooks (on 3 Marbles by Judith Kerman; Kissing the Bees by John Sokol; Surge by Matthew Cooperman; Bukowski Boulevard by Joan Jobe Smith; and The Last Campaign by Rachel Loden)

The Condition of My Faith

“I Am Telling You This as Calmly as I Can”: A Review of Recent Poetry Chapbooks All in All by Laura Chester; Catch and Release by Jamie Simpson; Fear of Everything by David Starkey; The Memphis Sun by Jim Murphy; A Day’s Work by Rick Campbell; Blue Numbers, Red Life by Roy Jacobstein; and Lilting by R. T. Smith)

The Trains

“It Can Take Awhile Until You Sound Like Yourself”: A Review of Recent Poetry Chapbooks (on Hands-On Saints by Holly Iglesias; Cooking in Key West by Ed Ochester; The Genuine Negro Hero by Thomas Sayers Ellis; The Spirit of Blue Ink by Walter Pavlich; Freight by Sondra Upham; and Against Elegies by Jack Ridl)

From the Mummy’s Breast (on The Fourth Watch of the Night by Louie Skipper; Les Mots Anglais by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno; Music Like Dirt by Frank Bidart; Base Pairs by Maria Melendez; The First Thing by Anna Kirwan; and The Circumference of Arrival by Sandra Meek)

Batter My Heart (on Lot of My Sister by Alison Stine; The Scottish Café by Susan H. Case; Three by Stephen Philbrick; Rendered into Paradise by Jean Feraca; Lost River by James Tate; A Tree Ogham by Marcia L. Hurlow; Earthbound and Singing to the Garden by Roger Pfingston; and Light Made from Nothing by Susan Elbe)

Hello, Sky (on Primer for Non-Native Speakers by Philip Metres; October by Louise Glück; Festival Bone by Karen Rigby; The Everyday Apocalypse by David Thomas Lloyd; Metropolitan Bird Culture by Becky Peterson; Water Stories by Brighde Mullins; Sinners in the Hands: Selections from the Catalog by Ann Killough; and Most Wanted by Muriel Nelson)

Hyacinthe and the Bear

The Alignments (on Considerations of Earth and Sky by Temple Cone; Radiant Field by Naomi K. Long; His Longing: (The Small Penis Oratorio) by Paul Allen; Solstice by Emmy Pérez; The Wrong End of the Rainbow by Charles Wright; The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook by Karl Elder; Myths of Electricity by Kevin Meaux; The Lowell Poems by Tom Sexton; and Days When Nothing Happens by David Tucker)

IN Fall/Winter 2006

Intense Agitation (on Time to Get Some Things Straight by John Repp; Black Poem by Gary Copeland Lilley; The Making of Collateral Beauty by Mark Yakich; The Invention of Fiction by Rick Bursky;Elegy and Collapse by Patty Paine; Coming to Flood by Sebastian Matthews; Leave Time by Jeff Worley; A House That Falls by Sean Nevin; Daphne and Jim: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Biography in Verse by Laurel Snyder; Hard Rain by Tony Hoagland; Dusk Outside the Braille Press by Paul Hostovsky; One by Diane Kerr; Carmina Detroit by Dawn McDuffie; Fern-Texts by Reginald Gibbons; First Things to Hand by Robert Pinsky; and The Packing House Cantata by William Trowbridge)

Where Does the Poetry Go? (on Time Is a Parlor Trick and Other Poems by Doyle D. Turner; Falling into Velázquez by Mary Kaiser; Contents of a Minute by Josephine Jacobsen; A Little White Shadow by Mary Ruefle; The Reindeer Camps by Barton Sutter; The Preacher by Gerald Stern; Turkish Pears in August: Twenty-Four Ramages by Robert Bly; Only on This Planet by John Graber; and A Word for It by Warren Slesinger)

London & a Friend

Four Cats and the Pathetic Fallacy

Dream Dancing

Secret Information

The other day, for no particular reason I can think of, I mentioned to my middle-aged daughter in conversation that I had been cleared for “secret” when I was in […]

Reliquaries

reliquary \ֽre-lə-ֽkwer-ē\ n. {Fr reliquaire, from ML reliquaiurium, from reliquia relic + Larium-ary—more at relic}: a casket, shrine, or container for keeping or exhibiting relics (remains, leavings, of a deceased […]