Praise for OUT TAKES/ GLOVE BOX
“Maya Jewell Zeller’s poems bite back. In lush, lyrical lines, she describes the sensuality of the natural world and the blistering challenge-dream of motherhood and cishet marriage. The contrast between freedom found in nature, in friendship, in solitude; and the weight of social expectations unravels at the touch of a body (of work) so expansive it lends its blood to make new hearts. Throughout this collection, poems morph from roots to trunks to dandelions blown, softness scattered across the field: ‘I want / to share this square of blue. Let’s fuck / up the room.’ These are courageous, captivating poems by a poet unafraid to tell the truth about her life.”
— CAROL GUESS, author of Book of Non and Sleep Tight Satellite
“Zeller’s out takes/glove box is a desk with so many cubbyholes, a hawthorne tree on which each bud is dark pink and then lighter pink
and then white and you can’t believe the intricacy and secrets you might have missed. These poems list images that are beautiful and interesting as they fly by, but then are zoomed in on individually to reveal more: the speaker’s ‘used little ovaries,’ the horse she cut open, her ‘glove box full of dirt.’ My favorite part of this book is the poetry of its structure: like a life, it opens and closes with out-takes, images that collect inside all of us before we have language, images that get neglected or forgotten for a while in the middle, while our speaker is busy being a mother and a myth, so those images must be returned to again: that rhododendron, that ‘small, smoldering dress.’”
— LAURA READ, author of But She Is Also Jane
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.