{"id":6637,"date":"2014-12-27T13:03:57","date_gmt":"2014-12-27T18:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=6637"},"modified":"2014-12-27T13:03:57","modified_gmt":"2014-12-27T18:03:57","slug":"the-pedestrians-by-rachel-zuckerwave-books-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-pedestrians-by-rachel-zuckerwave-books-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pedestrians by Rachel ZuckerWave Books, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

I picked this book up at the library several months after reading Dan Chiasson’s piece in the New Yorker<\/a> about Zucker’s work. I think it was Chiasson’s characterization of Zucker as a city poet that made me want to read her: he compares her to Frank O’Hara, and says this: “A city poet is a conduit for things said, actions observed, behaviors noted. Gossip, for a city poet, is really a form of passivity, part of a larger open-border policy toward whatever comes her way.” That open-ness is evident in poems like “please alice notley tell me how to be old,” which includes these great lines:<\/p>\n

\nI think the rookie cops are graduating today
\nTimes Square is a sea of blues there’s a secret
\nstaircase at the end of the shuttle platform that
\ntakes me right to my therapist’s office but you
\ndon’t live here anymore anyway Alice I haven’t
\ngot much time or maybe I have no one knows (96)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I like how writerly and everyday that poem is, the way it mixes city-moments with musings on gender\/work\/motherhood, what kinds of poems women write, or don’t. I also love “pedestrian,” another long-ish poem with a stream-of-consciousness style that’s full of great New York things, shopping and meandering and people-watching on the subway, like:<\/p>\n

\nthe woman next to me is reading an FSG book
\ncan’t see the title the man on her left snores
\n& leans into her please someone remind me what’s
\nthe point of literature? 72nd St & Cathy Wagner’s
\nbook My New Job<\/em> includes the word PENIS frequently (107)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In prose pieces, like those that make up the first section of the book, or like some of the dream-poems in the book’s second section, Zucker reminds me of Lydia Davis: a similar matter-of-fact tone, a similar sly humor, like in this passage from “mountains”:<\/p>\n

In the town she bought two avocados, red grapes, two kinds of soup, kale cakes, two teriyaki chicken thighs, a chocolate bar with almonds and sea salt, a whole kabocha squash, wasabi rice chips, peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. At a different store she bought another soup. Soup seemed important. She bought a small salt grinder filled with pink salt. She bought a d’Anjou pear. If anyone asked her if she wanted bread with that she said yes. She said she did not need any plastic spoons. (53)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This book turned out to be the perfect length to read on a flight from Atlanta to New York, and its combination of intelligence and approachability made it a lovely in-flight companion: I definitely want to read more of Zucker’s work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I picked this book up at the library several months after reading Dan Chiasson’s piece in the New Yorker about Zucker’s work. I think it was Chiasson’s characterization of Zucker as a city poet that made me want to read her: he compares her to Frank O’Hara, and says this: “A city poet is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}