Poetry
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Irreverent Litanies Regal House Publishing, 2019 “Whether in technically adept sonnets, ironic free verse, elegies, or straight-out litanies, the poet isn’t afraid to ask big questions.… Irreverent Litanies is a searching, timely collection that, once picked up, is difficult to put down!” – Frank Paino, author of The Rapture of Matter and Out of Eden “Like faucets that ‘sense your hands praying for the water to flow,’ Zack Rogow gives us poems we need, poems that ‘brighten like blown embers’ as you read them, poems that stick with you.” – Richard Chiappone, author of Water of an Undetermined Depth and Opening Days “Zack Rogow’s poems in Irreverent Litanies encapsulate the wonder found in unexpected revelations: a car’s mileage greater than Earth’s circumference, shirts surviving after their wearers are deceased, and pianos owned by Holocaust victims removed from their homes. Rogow poeticizes nontraditional poetic subjects, like Platonic solids or evening highway commutes. He takes traditional poetic subjects like the verses of Neruda, or the act of kissing, and makes them into something fresh and uncanny. Irreverent Litanies lists the things of the universe as a continual stream of holies, melting the binary of sacred and profane.” —Eric Fisher Stone, author of The Providence of Grass and Animal Joy. |
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Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music Kattywompus Press, 2015 “A luscious constellation of poetry & music & politics. I’m on board—conjuring up Billie Holiday just might be able to heal ‘the fracked thighs of the land’!” —Alisa Clancy, Program Director/Host, KCSM Jazz91 “Zack Rogow’s Talking with the Radio summons the ear with the measures of poetry, esp. the ghazal. …it is singing that Rogow’s poems commemorate, consider, and celebrate. Join him and listen.” —Patricia Spears Jones, author of Femme du Monde and Painkiller “These inventive riffs, raps, tributes to jazz and pop greats like Ella, Billie, Sarah, Dylan, and others, are Zack Rogow’s deeply heartfelt response in re-imagining these iconic voices with their honesty of feeling by Rogow’s musically engaging in their fierceness with his own more playful, but no less urgently truthful song.” —Jack Marshall, author of Spiral Trace |
My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers
Kattywompus Press, 2012
“The heart of this intensely moving book is the long poem about Rogow’s mother, an extraordinary woman through whose life Rogow illuminates the anguished, fabulous history of the twentieth century.”
—Robert Thomas, author of Bridge and Dragging the Lake.
The Number Before Infinity
Scarlet Tanager Books, 2008
“Reading Zack Rogow’s The Number Before Infinity, I was reminded of young Neruda’s love poems; here is that passion, tempered and informed by the briars and grace of marriage and family.”
—Cornelius Eady
“Very few poets have the courage to open themselves as fully as Zack Rogow does as he pours out, in passionate poetry, the story of a love affair and the family fallout it radiates. These poems are hot, honest, propelled by the skill of a first-rate worker in words to serve what William Carlos Williams said poetry was all about—feeling. Any reader who opens this extraordinary book and begins reading won’t put it down. That’s a guarantee.”
—Bill Zavatsky
The Face of Poetry Edited anthology of contemporary American poetry with photos by Margaretta K. Mitchell University of California Press, 2005 |
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Greatest Hits: 1979–2001 Pudding House Publications, 2002 Chapbook in the Greatest Hits series, edited by Jennifer Bosveld |
The Selfsame Planet
Mayapple Press, 1999
“The Selfsame Planet is an intriguing study of love and loneliness, longing and the human flaw that requires it. Rogow’s varied and rich persona poems in the voices of women artists permit this collection an emotional voluptuousness otherwise denied in poems that find their beauty by keeping well within strict confines of feeling.…I was moved by this seemingly understated but daring and beautiful collection.”
—Linda McCarriston
A Preview of the Dream
Gull Books, 1985 |
Make It Last
Slow Motion Press, 1983 With drawings by Ilse Gordon “Make It Last documents the keeping heart and the seeking intelligence of a young American poet determined to save himself and his country from boredom and terror, both. With honesty and wit, Rogow’s poems pose a relentlessly gentle, always recognizable portrait of the U.S.A. in the singular.... For the most part, the poet seems to be having a very good time, alive; his work welcomes us into that very good time; this is a generous and trusting revelation of a friend, a man, a way of being one among many with much faith.” —June Jordan |
Glimmerings
More Than Coincidence Press, 1979 With drawings by Linda Touby |
Please contact the author to obtain copies of the last three books:
zrogow AT berkeley DOT edu
zrogow AT berkeley DOT edu