Beautiful Zero

by Jennifer Willoughby

Overview

“These poems get under your skin and stay there.” —JIM MOORE

Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems in this award-winning debut collection—selected by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—are filled with explosive wit and humor like “a knife you don’t see coming.”

A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through Beautiful Zero, embracing forms of culture high and low. Poems about Shark Week and college football sit beside biting critiques of modern war. A series of poems set in a Kaiser Permanente hospital tear into the world of privatized health care while simultaneously charting a story of love in the face of catastrophe. Yet even at her most surreal, Jennifer Willoughby always finds the pulsing heart at the core of the poem. She embraces what she cannot understand about both the world and herself because, after all, “Nothing is as random as they say it is. / You were born the weirdo that you are.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571314802
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	12/08/2015
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Willoughby’s poetry has appeared in the Believer, Boston Review, and the Indiana Review, among many others. She has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship, as well as the Academy of American Poets James Wright Award. Willoughby graduated from the University of Minnesota’s MFA program and currently works as a freelance advertising copywriter. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she currently lives in Minneapolis, MN.

Editorial Reviews

12/21/2015
“What if I tell you that the face of a woman/ is full of questions,” asks the forceful, strong-voiced speaker of Willoughby’s debut. “The questions point away/ from her body,” and Willoughby moves by probing outward through a process of active association. Her poems rely on idiosyncratic observation, asking of the poetic task, “isn’t forensic investigation where it’s at?” As the speaker’s mind (and also the reader’s) wanders in response to diffuse stimuli, one’s initial sense of the world is replaced swiftly with another and then another, and novelty becomes key to making meaning. It’s a world in which “a bird is an object that breaks light/ into patterns” and “The trees don’t know if/ this will ever get better.” Novelty pervades the heart of the collection, a near-confessional series called “Kaiser Variations” that takes a formally inventive approach to describing a long hospitalization and repeated encounters with the night surgeon. They’re nothing short of surreal, befitting a magical and energetic collection where the “sky turns the color/ of morning glories just before they/ die.” Reacquainting readers with the endless potential of language, Willoughby shows that “What’s great about the jungle,” and indeed, what’s great about these poems, is that “there/ are all these ways to love.” (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"To read Beautiful Zero is to follow a pack of holy fools right off a cliff—but there’s a buoy in the sea at bottom, a life-preserver, a raft."—Dana Levin

These poems get under your skin and stay there. Oh, and did I mention how funny they are? We should all pray to have Willoughby sitting next to us at the next boring meeting we have to attend, whispering her poems into our ears.”—Jim Moore

"Willoughby’s matter-of-fact tone enriches her eccentric vision and this book persistently surprises with synaptic leaps and dendritic movement. In its search to 'embrace what it means to be here' Beautiful Zero makes both the marvelous and quotidian buzz with brilliance."—Matt Rasmussen

From the Publisher