Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Winner of the 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. "This is a wizard's handiwork.... SONNETS TO THE HUMANS stands as one unstoppered bottle for a host of genii, lightning-Nimrods, angel-demons, Ænglisch as demotic, ash as egg. It's a brilliant, intimate, intricate, careening, calibrating, strangely moving collection of 49 poems—pieces introduced and linked by patches of the prose narration of 'a fictional poet who lived in the 21st century' and bore the name of Vishvamitra.... Thus we embark, in part, on an old story—but one re-generated here in ways unheralded, unheard-of. It becomes a futuristic lover's lyrical lament and a recapitulation (or enactment) of the Babel tale; (even thus largely to restrict its scope can only be reductive: it's a book with a very long half-life)."—Heather McHugh, judge of the 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize
About the Author
T. Zachary Cotler was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1981 and spent his childhood north of San Francisco. He took degrees from Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first book, House with a Dark Sky Roof, came out in 2011, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The Wolf, the Paris Review, Narrative, Republic of Letters, and other journals in the US and UK. His awards include the Amy Clampitt Fellowship from the Clampitt estate and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He's a founding editor of The Winter Anthology.