This week on The Write Question, host Lauren Korn speaks with poet Maya Jewell Zeller, author of out takes/ glove box (New American Press). The two talk about Maya’s birth story, childhood, and motherhood; cars, trucks, and traveling; and Maya’s primal self—a psychology (and a poetics) borne of the sea and the woods, of the natural world.
Eduardo Corral selected out takes/ glove box to receive the New American Poetry Prize: “In out takes/ glove box, the speaker thinks beautifully through the shifting sands of mothering and tracks the body as it spirals through time,” says Corral. “The language is dazzling. We’re privy to a ‘vermillion funeral’ and learn an astonishing thing, ‘[t]he square root of whiskey is water.’ Intimacy, here, includes the natural world. Animals and plants are tended to, torn into, and observed with an enviable capacity to render them mythic, tangible. These poems are spellbinding-read them out loud to experience their full power.”
Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frank: Sonnets (Graywolf Press), has offered the following praise: “In Maya Jewell Zeller’s enchanting out takes/ glove box, the vehicles that carry us into and out of imaginative spaces abound, from a rusted car with its glove box full of dirt to a horse, ‘hinged and winged/ like moths, its wet little eggs / still bobbing in their soft ponds.’ Eggs abound, their mothers and their hatchlings. Indeed, the book could be said to be an ‘oocyte opera’ of ovarian orbits and eddies, each month offering up its ‘vermilion funeral.’ Zeller’s surrealism is embodied and embedded in myth, fairy tale, the realm of the family, and the kingdom of the natural world. She calls her process, in one title, ‘Re-Making the Personal Environmental Imagination.’ The poems are oceanic, Edenic, their music, as she writes in a poem, ‘vowelly, ‘ but that lyric fluidity is crenelated by the notion and practice of ‘out takes,’ and the image of the ‘glove box,’ compound words snapped, like bones, in two. Images and ideas are honed and reiterated; they drop their beauty and defer to honesty. It is the kind of deft performance only a mermaid or a mother could pull off.”
Note: All TWQ conversations (2020-present) are edited for length.
This conversation was recorded in partnership with the 2023 Montana Book Festival, where Maya appeared as a participating author.
About Maya:
Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of out takes/ glove box, chosen by Eduardo Corral as winner of the New American Poetry Prize; as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017); the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015); and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). She is co-editor, with Sharma Shields, of the anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales and Fables from the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Maya’s prose appears in The Rumpus, Diagram, Brevity, Bellingham Review, Booth Journal, and elsewhere. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. Currently, she is Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University, Affiliate Faculty for Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA, and Poetry Editor for Scablands Books. Her WIPs are a memoir called Raised by Ferns (runner-up in the 2022 AWP Sue Silverman Prize for Creative Non-Fiction), as well as the academic textbook, Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (forthcoming from Bloomsbury UK, January 2024). Find Maya on Twitter @MayaJZeller.
Maya Jewell Zeller recommends:
The poetry of Enheduanna
The poetry and writing of Sei Shōnagon
The poetry of Sappho
Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling (reissued, Milkweed Editions)
The poetry of Henrietta Goodman, author of Take What You Want (Alice James Books), Hungry Moon (Center for Literary Publishing [at Colorado Station University]), All That Held Us (BkMk Press), and Antillia (forthcoming, The Backwaters Press)
The poetry of Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms and The Keys to the Jail (BOA Editions)
The poetry of Sean Hill, author of Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (University of Georgia Press)
Lauren Korn recommends:
out takes/ glove box by Maya Jewell Zeller (New American Press)
Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates (Tin House Books)
All Its Charms by Keetje Kuipers (BOA Editions)
Almost Beauty by Sue Sinclair (Goose Lane Editions)
The Knowing Animals by Emily Skov-Nielsen (Brick Books)
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The Write Question team for this episode was Lauren Korn, host, co-producer, and editor; and Jake Birch, co-producer and editor; and Chris Moyles, sound engineer. This episode is sponsored by Chapter One Bookstore in Hamilton, Montana, a literary and community resource for the Bitterroot Valley—providing space to explore, discover, and share passions since 1974. More information can be found at Chapter1Bookstore.com.
The Write Question logo and brand (2022) was designed by Molly Russell. You can see more of her work at iamthemollruss.com and on Instagram @iamthemollruss. Our music was written and recorded by John Floridis.
Funding for The Write Question comes from Humanities Montana; members of Montana Public Radio; and from the Greater Montana Foundation—encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.
The Write Question is a production of Montana Public Radio.
