Praise for OUT TAKES/ GLOVE BOX
“In out takes/glove box, the speaker thinks beautifully through the shifting sands of mothering and tracks the body as it spirals through time. 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.”
— EDUARDO CORRAL, author of Slow Lighting and Guillotine
“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.”
— DIANE SUESS, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of frank: sonnets
“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), and co-author, with Kathryn Nuernberger, of the textbook Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury UK, January 2024). Recipient of a 2024 Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship, 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. She is Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University and Affiliate Faculty for Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA. Her memoir, Raised by Ferns (runner-up in the 2022 AWP Sue Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction), will be out in early 2026 from Porphyry Press. Contact her via web: mayajewellzeller.com
