Awards
Winner of the Second Annual Slope Editions Book Prize
Synopses & Reviews
Zoo Music marks another step in the Minneapolis Renaissance - William Waltz's book, like those of his Twin Cities peers, storms over the American poetic landscape at the right time, sweeping aside today's tired ultra-irony and hyper-humor in favor of ineffable strangeness and touching sincerity. A zebra of different stripes. Chosen by Dean Young as Winner of the Second Annual Slope Editions Book Prize.
Review
"In Zoo Music, youre going to hear squawks from the aviary while visiting the reptile house. Youre going to smell gazelle while looking at the jellyfish. It is through these sorts of disturbing juxtapositions, within the wreckage of expected contexts, that new coherences, new musics arise. We hear something we dont know what so we listen harder and soon another melody is born, one that rises not out of exclusion but out of rigorous, even mad, variety." Dean Young, author of Strike Anywhere: Poems
Review
"What draws me to this book; the language, which is often lush, and discordant when necessary. The imagination, which prowls the surreal band of the poetic spectrum without losing a sense that meaning is our purpose. Most of all, because this is a book of love poems love poems to our cities, to the environment on which we depend, to our touching and confused existence if you believe love is intelligence strangely but critically applied.
Waltz is wonderful at letting his ideas take him far into a poem, until they reach beyond themselves into a kind of wisdom that is also an honest and deep kind of groping for the truth. And I don't think I'm supposed to say fun in a blurb, but these poems are fun: Waltz lets go and in letting go, hits the mark." Bob Hicok, author of Insomnia Diary
Review
"Through all of its pages Zoo Music's title resonates wtih bittersweetly realized authenticity. One hears so many different sorts of music in the zoo; some plaintive, some raucous, some melancholy, some which seem to come from far off times and places; it's one of the wonders of Waltz's imaginative powers to conjure the mixtures our lives are. I love this book; Waltz and poetry are beautifully matched." Dara Wier, author of Hat on a Pond
About the Author
William Waltz grew up in Wapakoneta, Ohio, home of the first man on the moon. He earned a B.A. in Economics from Ohio State University and a M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His poems have appeared such journals as Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Forklift Ohio, Insurance, Lit, Poetry East, Spinning Jenny, Surgery of Modern Warfare and Verse. He lives and works in Minneapolis with his wife Brett Astor and their daughter Clark Mercy. He is the editor of Conduit.