Mezzanine: Poems
In her striking collection of poems, Zoë Hitzig investigates how we seek certitude, power, and domination over the natural world and one another. Hitzig brings a scientific rigor to her searing lyricism, as well as a raucous energy and willingness to allow her work to dwell in states of uncertainty and precariousness. The result is an original voice that is incisive and unsparing, but also passionate and tender. Her poems probe the authority of language and logic, questioning the sovereignty of the technological, economic, legal, and political systems that mediate our lives.
Urgent in its creation of a new way of looking at our social and natural worlds, Mezzanine is an insightful and visceral debut collection from a poet whose work is poised to leave a lasting mark.
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Zoë Hitzig is a poet and PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. Her poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, New Statesman, Boston Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her writing about poetry has appeared in BOMB and Prac Crit. Mezzanine is her first book.
"Do we sound like robots or do robots sound like us? In poems of conscience, intelligence, and wit, Zoë Hitzig presents arguments in support of both possibilities. Mostly, throughout Mezzanine's many ingenious premises and modes of address, what I hear is an ageless stark wisdom calling us to decide who and what we are, and what we are willing to heed." -- Tracy K. Smith
"In Mezzanine, we confront a world of diminishing returns--yet with powerful poetic yield." -- Carol Muske-Dukes
"Zoë Hitzig's exquisitely engineered Mezzanine lands the reader in a nether place of talking commodities, misplaced agency, category mistakes, and radical dysphoria. Into such dire circumstances Hitzig dives headfirst, feverish, an investigator who grapples with reality by recreating it from the inside out. In other words, she is a poet, and an extraordinary one at that...Here and there, and just in time, Mezzanine reminds us what there is to love in the human, and what it feels like to to feel it's still too soon to give up." -- Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of Many
"[An] astonishing literary debut...This poet indicts all of us for historical crimes against the first person. at the edge of extinction, she carries on her inquest into identity, however fugitive its traces may be." -- Srikanth Reddy, author of Voyager
