Reviews for Strange Attraction: The Best of Ten Years of Zyzzyva

The average rating for Strange Attraction: The Best of Ten Years of Zyzzyva based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-07 00:00:00 Mark Lazor I have to confess that during my decades of writing several hours a day, 362 days a year, and submitting work to hundreds, thousands of zines, journals, magazines, publications around the world and during my decades of prolific success, while I had a very good acceptance percentage and was fortunate enough to be published in many high quality literary journals as well as newspapers, commercial magazines and more, there were really very few "major" ones I actually liked to read. I know that sounds nuts, but I was never a big fan of the New Yorker or the Paris Review, nor the Southern Humanities Review, Ploughshares, etc. Too damn mainstream, too much a party of the only "acceptable" literary canon, as defined by those who thought and think they are the official arbiters of such. Most of whom are idiots with no talent. However, there were some journals, as well as many zines, magazines and the like, that I DID look forward to, often because they weren't so freaking obsessed with calm ponds, chirping robins, lovely deer in the forest, calm lake waters and all that bullshit. At a minimum, they'd publish a diverse selection of material and writers, typically mixing the totally unknown with the most famous around. And on more topics of interest, relatable to me and others who weren't Black Mountain fans, and Zyzzyva was one of them. Some others included Exquisite Corpse, New York Quarterly, Long Shot, Wormwood Review, Chiron Review, Caffeine, ONTHEBUS, Rattle, Poetry, Asheville Poetry Review, Main Street Rag and several others. The interesting thing about Zyzzyva was it centered largely on West Coast writers, and that intrigued me even before I became a West Coast writer! Zyzzyva was a large, beautiful perfect bound book-sized journal and Junker, as editor, picked some great stuff, a nice fairly diverse selection of works, with a great mix of writers, and it was one of the few I read through cover to cover. I must admit though that one of my great publishing disappointments was I could never get Howard to accept ANY of my stuff, and I submitted annually for years! And I couldn't figure out why because he published a ton of writers I was often published with in other magazines. It didn't make any sense. But every editor is different and frankly it's often subjective. Sometimes you like a person's work and never another's, no matter how qualified or whatever. I was an editor and publisher myself for some years, so I know what I'm talking about. There were two sides to this. On one hand, if various literary journals rejected me a couple of times, I usually crossed them off my list and moved on, but there were - for reasons I still don't know - some others out there that I continued to submit to every damn year for YEARS, both hoping and convinced they'd eventually accept some of my work, only to be rejected annually by 98% of them. It was disheartening. It's been a long time and I forget virtually all of them, but I do recall one was Arizona State's Haydens Ferry Review, the annual issue of ONTHEBUS - and Jack Grapes, the editor, was a freaking friend of mine! - the Sierra Nevada Review (seriously???) and a few others. One that finally accepted my work after over a decade of submissions was Emory University's Lullwater Review. Funny, that... And so Zyzzyva was one of these journals. Conversely, there were some high quality writers, editors, magazines, journals and zines that liked me personally, liked what and how I wrote, liked my work and in some cases, loved to publish me constantly. As in the opposite of the example I just gave in the previous paragraph. Some of the writers and editors who seemed to like me included the great Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gerald Locklin (author of over 125 books, as well as editor), Michael Bugeja at Writer's Digest, who liked to quote me as an SME in the annual Poet's Market they published, the incredible Charles Bukowski, the longtime editor of the esteemed Poetry Magazine, Joseph Parisi (who amusingly secretly confided in me that he loved my work but worried that some might be "too much" for the traditional Poetry Magazine reader, which I thought was funny and it made me happy to see people like myself and the most openly anti-establishment poet around - Bukowski - start to appear in Poetry and other high quality literary journals, in some cases with the editors gritting their teeth, I'm sure), Black Flag's Henry Rollins, who was publisher of his own press, and many others. And as stated, there were some journals and magazines that seemed to like to publish my work regularly to constantly in virtually every issue. Some of these included Chiron Review, Caffeine (where I regularly appeared alongside Bukowski), Hawaii Review, Pearl, Long Shot, Finland's Sivullinen (and many other Finnish magazines, where they often shockingly put me on their covers alongside Bukowski - I mean photos and everything!), Belgium's De Nar, Poetry Ireland Review (with Seamus Heaney, and they paid very well!), the infamous longtime punk magazine, Flipside, whose poetry editor loved my stuff, the famous horro magazine, Wicked Mystic (they paid well), L.A.'s big Saturday Afternoon Journal, music magazine Industrialnation, and a number of others. The point? The point is that while I was very successful, pretty well known around the world in those kinds of literary circles, appeared regularly in publications featuring Ginsberg, Bukowski, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, William Burroughs, and other heavyweights, I felt I *should* have been good enough to have my work appear in most publications I submitted to -- because I did so strategically, avoiding those I knew wouldn't like my style or my stuff -- and so Zyzzyva remained a constant disappointment for me as a writer because I could not understand at all why Junker wouldn't publish me when he published so many others in my various circles. But I never let that disappointment ruin my appreciation for and love of that journal, and while I've not seen it in a long time, I'll always remember it fondly and with great respect. If you missed out on it, I recommend looking up old issues, or perhaps ... of course, getting this book because Howard picked an assortment of quality writers and material to appear in these pages, so I strongly recommend it.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-23 00:00:00 Gerson Enamorado We're not sure this is the first comprehensive collection of the best and most exciting poetry to appear in this new century, but we're fairly certain it is the most extensive and ambitious. Emphasizing young and mid-career poets, with the usual smattering of acknowledged veterans, this impressive collection of almost 500 pages contains both new and previously published work of what can honestly be termed "the best and the brightest" of a new generation of poets. In addition to a minimum of three poems by each writer, the book also includes brief biographical sketches as well as bibliographical information and sources. Innovative, unified by the vision of the editors, and unashamedly provocative, this is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the current and future trends of American verse.