Eduardo Corral, author of SLOW LIGHTNING and GUILLOTINE, selected this compelling collection by Maya Jewell Zeller 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, 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."
Zeller, Maya Jewell: - 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 Nonfiction), 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.
