Monkey Lightning

Poetry. Martha Zweig's fourth collection of poems is her strongest. With a voice and verbal texture like no other contemporary poet's, she transfigures the sonorous traditional English lyric with an audacity that's rugged and unruly but sublimely literary. Zweig's etymological wizardry recalls the intoxicating wordplay of the rustics and faeries in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet in their dramatic candor, Zweig's new poems are also as bull's-eye direct as John Berryman's blues-drenched Dream Songs. From the howling, buzzing, frosty reaches of the north woods we bring you...MONKEY LIGHTNING! The best work yet by a virtuoso conjuror.

Participant in the semi-revolutionary turmoil of the 1960s, Martha Zweig worked for a decade in the garment industry at Concord Manufacturing in Morrisville, Vermont, including a term as shop chair for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and another ten years as an advocate for seniors in northern Vermont, where she has lived since 1974. Zweig received a Whiting Writer's Award in 1999, and her poems have been published in many of the nation's leading literary and political journals, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Field, The Boston Review, The Progressive, The Kenyon Review, and Sojourner. Zweig's previous books include Vinegar Bone and What Kind (Wesleyan, 1999 and 2003). Currently she volunteers for North Country Animal League and for Restorative Justice, a community organization promoting a post-police process based on the "truth and reconcilation" approach developed in South Africa.