The Pedestrians

by Rachel Zucker

"Zucker is a poet of bottom-scraping, blood-chilling existential anxiety, one among many, and a poet of New York City, one among many, and a poet of American Jewish inheritance, one among many, and one of the funniest, too."—Boston Review

Rachel Zucker returns to themes of motherhood, marriage, and the life of an artist in this double collection of poems. Fables, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. The Pedestrians brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations.

That Great Diaspora

I'll never leave New York & when I do
I too will be unbodied—what? you
imagine I might transmogrify? I'm from
nowhere which means here & so wade out
into the briny dream of elsewheres like
a released dybbyk but can't stand
the soulessness now everyone who ever
made sense to me has died & everyone I love
grows from my body like limbs on a rootless tree

Rachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife, The Last Clear Narrative, Eating in the Underworld, and Annunciation.

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories, New York, Fiction

160 pages, Hardcover

First published April 8, 2014

About the author

Rachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan University, 2007), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan University, 2004), Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan University, 2003), and Annunciation (The Center for Book Arts, 2002), as well as the co-editor (with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Zucker has taught at several institutions, including NYU and Yale. She currently lives in NYC with her husband and three sons, and is a certified labor doula.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/63-...

Reviews

[D.A.]

If you haven't read Zucker, there's really no time like the present. She is delightful, exploring the roles of wife and mother with humor, disarming candor, and a fresh encounter with the dream world and its poetic opportunities. Easily one of the most intriguing poets of the new century. Also check out her other books, including Bad Wife Handbook and the Museum of Accidents.

[Josh]

I am a character in this book. Seriously.

[dc]

like beach combing for treasures but on the streets of nyc.

[Peter Landau]

To paraphrase “Dr. Stangelove”: when I learned to stop worrying and love poetry there was no stopping me. I didn’t have to understand it, just experience it. The words on the page often crystalized, not literally but literarily, and fell into a place of integrity that was beyond comprehension and yet satisfying. Often that satisfaction is not on an intellectual level, but something less pragmatic and more impractical. I know, I know. I sound like one of those rate-a-record teenagers on “American Bandstand,” but there’s a lot of connection between poetry and rock and roll. What drew me to THE PEDESTRIANS by Rachel Zucker was that it had a beat that I could dance to. I, too, am a parent of three children, and that was enough of an entry point. After that it all washed over me in perfectly distilled fables and dreams and poems, each saying just enough, honestly and originally. The title poem, the longest in the book, may be the greatest poem I read today. Maybe even tomorrow. The highest recommendation? I want to share this book with the woman I love. Isn’t that what poetry’s all about?

[Melissa]

"Sometimes, at night, when she turns away from him, it is obvious what she wants. The backside of her body is itself an invitation. Other times she turns away to give her left shoulder a rest or because that part of the pillow is too hot."

I appreciate the clarity and humor here -- I often felt like someone was speaking to me directly. At times, too, this book hits a note of breathless conveyance (as in the poem "i do not like your job") which is so good. At other times it's not as successful to me -- I felt less invested than I wanted to be.

[Morgan]

god —— damn

[Emily Pérez]

I am in a total Rachel Zucker phase and I loved this book. I might not have loved it at another time in my life, as I might have found parts of it too "talky." That said, I think Zucker pulls it off. Her poems about motherhood and marriage really resonate with me and she hits at emotional truths in a refreshing way in a voice that is a modern addition to the New York School. I also loved the fables at the start of the book and hope to steal that format in the future.

[Sarah]

I’m a really slow reader but I moved through this collection quickly — because while it’s full of lyric moments there’s also a narrative that emerges and urges the reader forward. I love the wry humor in the collection and Zucker’s almost flat, anti-poetic delivery at moments. While this was written and published *almost* a decade ago, the speaker’s exhaustion with the world and the bullshit/nonsensical machinations of society are wholly relatable and relevant to a reader in 2022. “please alice notley tell me how to be old” is 🔥

[Briana]

3.5

[Heather]

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 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:

I think the rookie cops are graduating today
Times Square is a sea of blues there's a secret
staircase at the end of the shuttle platform that
takes me right to my therapist's office but you
don't live here anymore anyway Alice I haven't
got much time or maybe I have no one knows (96)

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:

the woman next to me is reading an FSG book
can't see the title the man on her left snores
& leans into her please someone remind me what's
the point of literature? 72nd St & Cathy Wagner's
book My New Job includes the word PENIS frequently (107)

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":

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)

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.

[Sarah]

In an effort to be a better and more well-rounded reader, I checked out this collection of poetry. I liked it quite a bit, although the first section of paragraphy poems, "Fables," made much more sense to me than the more poemy poems in "The Pedestrians." I especially liked the dream poems and the real poems and feel like I get a gold star for recognizing the high quality of the titular "pedestrian."

"She wanted to make something out of peacefulness but worried that peacefulness was antithetical to makefulness."

[Burnside Soleil]

Strange and wonderful vulnerability.

[Liv Lunch]

generally uninterested in unhappy marriages liked some of the poems in the matter half tho

[Caitlin Conlon]

Though I enjoyed the first section of this collection considerably more than the second, I really loved spending time with Zucker’s work. She’s playful, & has a poetic voice that really jumps off the page. These were just plain fun poems to read, & I’ll definitely be revisiting her work in the future.

[Francescajemm]

I loved this so much. I’m not even a New Yorker and I could totally feel the city seeping out of these pages. In addition to loving the way she interrogates everything we think we know about mothering, marriage, work.

[Lindsay]

Poetry part was ehhhhhhh. The prose I enjoyed.

[Emily Butler]

Hovering between three and four stars. I liked it but not as much as Museum of Accidents. Looking forward to hunting down and reading the rest of her work.

[RSter]

2.5 stars
I preferred the poems over the prose of the first half of the book.

[Jessica Klimesh]

Beautiful!

[Tiffany]

I really really enjoyed a few of these poems. Mostly, however, I felt like I was reading stream of consciousness poetry about someone else’s dreams, which is really not my jam.

[Delia Rainey]

""I" is / the name of this feeling"

[Courtney]

I really enjoyed Rachel’s exploration of motherhood through her poetry and prose. I was inspired to write poems of my own by reading her book.

[Debs]

3.5 stars. I preferred the poetry in this to the short fiction.

[Allegra Hyde]

“How can any mother write an epic?” asks Rachel Zucker in her most recent poetry collection, The Pedestrians. Filled with fables, dreams, and ruminations, the book quivers with the anxiety of acting as both parent and artist. “I’m so terribly interruptible,” Zucker writes of her epic-writing prospects, echoing the conflict of which artists—especially male artists—have complained for centuries: that family life and art-making seem at odds. How can one access truth, beauty, God, when faced with endless domestic travails? Perhaps by skipping town. Or, like Karl Ove Knausgård in his autobiographical novel My Struggle, by grumbling through one’s chores: “It is a question of getting through the morning, the three hours of diapers that have to be changed, clothes that have to be put on, breakfast that has to be served, faces that have to be washed, hair that has to be combed and pinned up… [edited for length]… whereupon I have the next five hours for writing until the mandatory routines for the children resume.”

In The Pedestrians, however, Zucker seems to blame artistic impediments on herself, not her family. She is too “interruptible”; if her writing suffers, it is her own fault, having accepted responsibility for two kinds of creation. So how do mothers write epics? Perhaps by combining poetic instincts with the reality of changing diapers, of waiting in traffic and endless grocery lines. “No one told me,” says Zucker, in an interview for The Believer, “that being a woman, a wife, a mother, a human being, was going to involve so much drudgery.” By divulging this drudgery—the reality that the artist’s life is not always a passion-filled odyssey, but that it can be banal and doubt-ridden—Zucker moves towards a necessary truth: an honest rendering of a modern woman’s artistic experience.

[ For my full review of Rachel Zucker's THE PEDESTRIANS for New Orleans Review visit: http://www.neworleansreview.org/the-p... ]

[Raffi]

Zucker reminds me of Frank O'Hara and W.S. Merwin stylistically, mostly since she doesn't punctuate her verse. She's a teacher at NYU; like O'Hara her poems feature the city, but she's way more anxious and ambivalent about living in a city: "it seems inevitable I'm dehumanized by NY & my / proximity to others fatal loneliness of crowds". This ain't no celebration of the "people hive," but still city life is, for Zucker, "the only real life I know." The real merit of this book is that Zucker's poems are deeply personal but inexhaustible; they are exhilarating, insightful, and somehow her shameless self-revealing isn't boring.

[Vincent Scarpa]

While I didn't necessarily jive with every poem in the "The Pedestrians" section, I did enjoy many of them, but it's the opening seventy pages or so—a section entitled "Fables"—that forms this mini-novella of which I could've read 300 more pages, and thus makes this a strong four-star book. Looking forward to reading more Zucker very soon.

[Erik Wirfs-Brock]

The first half is prose poems about a troubled marriage, and the second half of this collection is filled with poems about dreams, and living in the city. Entirely accessible for someone who doesn't read very much poetry anymore,emotionally honest, and with some real moments of brilliance, this is a collection I will try to force on other people and not just let it molder on my bookshelf.

[Tony]

I heard Zucker lecture on poetry recently in Seattle. It was wonderful--ten myths about poetry. You can hear it on the Library of Congress web site. The book has, as someone noted, an airy, surreal, urban horror setting. I'd hoped for something a little more engrossing from someone who has been compared with Merwin & Lydia Davis. Perhaps she's more like Padget Powell.

[Mike]

I didn’t know beforehand but this was just exactly what I wanted right now. Zucker takes all of the everyday anxieties and frustrations of artmaking and motherhood and marriage and makes something amazing out of them. Moving through different registers from stream-of-consciousness to fable, this collection just hit me dead-on. So good.

[Leah]

Such a great book! I've been a fan of Rachel's for a long time. she has a lot of readings this month, too.
Stay tuned for my tin house interview with her later this month!!