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RUST FISH

RUST FISH

$15.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9844510-9-8

Pub Date: Mar. 2011

Pages: 88


By Maya Jewell Zeller


Maya Jewell Zeller's first collection of poems chronicles a speaker's tentative relationship with humans versus her comfortable loyalty to the natural/animal world. Through the experiences of the young woman narrator, the reader comes to understand a parallel between femininity and nature, especially as each are exploited by humankind. The conceit of the amorphous rust fish extends throughout the manuscript in a series of five title poems, each in some way exemplifying the malleability of life, as well as in other poems throughout the series which allude to decomposition and cycles of birth and death, along with myriad related themes.


In Zeller's first book, Rust Fish, a young woman has a conversation with the succulent natural world. They speak of the endless summers of youth, the sober winters of the Pacific Northwest, the violence of children, and the benign neglect that nature offers even its acolytes. Throughout the book, fish are this speaker's consorts. Fish, both real and imagined, stream through these poems, past the various totems of working class poverty to the inevitable sea. Zeller asks many big questions in quiet, sly ways in this wonder-full book. How can a person live in such a gorgeous and difficult world? How can the sensual redeem us? Which is the bruise that heals? Which is the one that stays?

—Connie Voisine


    In the small room of the self, the imaginative child looks out, wishing up the world. Visitors—beetles, “each back opening and closing on itself,” smelt, flood plain, river, even the “rust fish,” bronze statues, now rusted, of salmon in the public place—transform her and are transformed in her presence. The imagination, however, does not trade in illusion. Locals like herself know the “sea smell” the tourists come for is really the rotting corpse of a seal, know the red room she has been locked in is not a dream. In this book of poems infused with magic cadences, Maya Zeller spells the damaged world into sparkle again.

    —Melissa Kwasny


    Maya Zeller's American Northwest is a land of verdant sensuality, insistent yet fragile and intimate as it was in the eyes of Roethke, storied in mossy and weathered details, human ruin and hard won grace as it was in the heart of Kesey. With extraordinary veracity and empathy she inhabits the body and emerging consciousness of a girl and young woman alive to the lives around her. There are poetry books with the power to move poets, fewer poetry books with the power to move lovers of literature, and those rare poetry books with the power to move just about anyone else. Rust Fish is all three.

    —Jonathan Johnson


    Maya Jewell Zeller grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Born at home in the upstairs apartment of her parents’ gas station on the Oregon coast, Maya has been a high school teacher, cross country and track coach, an editor, a college professor, and most recently, a mother. Her poetry has won awards from The Florida Review and Crab Orchard Review. Maya is Affiliate Faculty in Poetry and Nature Writing for Western Colorado University and Professor of English in the Professional and Creative Writing Program for Central Washington University.

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