SoundMachine

By Rachel Zucker

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Rachel Zucker sweeps all the corners in this maximalist project of poems and prose, navigating love, loss, and personal and political despair. Through heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, she trains her relentless attention on marriage, motherhood, grief, the need to speak, depression, sex, and many other topics. Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay—and not limited by any of these categories—SoundMachine is a book written out of the persistent feeling that the human voice is both a meaningless sound and the only way we know we exist.
  
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• Artfully layered . . . these pieces defy genre and interrogate the role of wife, mother, and artist as fixed identities. . . . Zucker renders even the simplest inquiries—such as "hasn’t anyone tried to stop this?"—resonant and profound in this restless and thoughtful book.
  Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
  
  SoundMachine’s immediacy and urgency make reading it an imperative.
  Katie Berta, Ploughshares
  

• Rachel Zucker is the author of The Poetics of Wrongness (Wave Books, 2023), SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019), The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014), and Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Zucker is an adjunct professor at NYU and other places. In 2016 she was a Bagley Wright Lecturer and wrote and delivered a series of talks on poetry, photography, confessionalism, motherhood, and the ethics of representing real people in art. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship in 2016, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center in 2018. Zucker is mother to three sons and lives in Washington Heights, NY and Scarborough, ME.