conclusion to this story. . .”
He writes poems about how we seek and reject wisdom, about Blake and tigers, and God’s power, about Bible stories and their hold on some of us, and about Milton and Auden, about corruption and suffering in his church, and about priests and teachers, truths and cover-ups. He writes about family and about deep, true, longed-for love.
So, this first book has a kind of abundance. Sometimes it is easy to move from poem to poem, sometimes not. We might be slowed down in our reading by a remarkable image, or because we are watching a narrator really working to understand these lives we have been given. This new poet enters the national conversations now; his work will be read and his work will be remembered for its beauty on the page, its acute examinations of power—in families, in schools, in biblical stories, in churches—in its exploration of what it means to love with honor, and what it means to judge and to forgive. In the final poem of the book our poet writes: “I want to be a true poem. . .I want my memories to father forth my manhood, whatever that is, young as it is.”
This book is full of true poems, written by a truthful, wonderfully gifted poet. How fortunate we are to watch Zach Czaia examine and consider what a human life can mean, can be, how fortunate to have his voice join the great and abiding river of poets’ voices.
Deborah Keenan
Professor in the MFA Program at Hamline University
Poet, author of eleven collections—most recently, Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems, Milkweed Editions; From Tiger to Prayer, a book of writing ideas, broadcraft press; and, so she had the world, Red Bird Chapbooks Press.
Acknowledgments
A heartfelt thank you to the following publications in which these poems first appeared: Anglican Theological Review: “Simon Peter’s Wife, on the Rabbi Jesus” ; Chiron Review: “Memory From Year of Substitute Teaching in Minneapolis Public”; Christianity & Literature: “What Marcus Borg’s Video Camera Might Have Seen If He’d Been Filming in Jerusalem In the Days Following the Death of the Jewish Peasant, Jesus”; Commonweal: “Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota)” and “Flesh is Funny”; Dappled Things: “Benque, 2005”; St. Katherine Review: “Forgiveness”; Sojourners: “The Blades of Grass in the Garden of Gethsemane Speak to Me.”
Thank you to the wonderfully supportive writing community at Hamline University’s MFA program, especially Katrina Vandenberg, Jim Moore and Patricia Francisco, who contributed mightily to this project through their teaching and conferencing with me.
Special thank you to Deborah Keenan, poet and teacher at Hamline University, for five years of support and guidance. Without you, I would not be a poet.
To the community of teachers and students at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota where I have taught the past six years. Both teachers and students offer me daily inspiration and love. I have been fed and nourished here in ways I can’t begin to count.
To Jennifer Haselberger for your courageous decision to come forward and expose the cover-up of sexual abuse in the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
To my friend, Andrew, who has been there with me through good times and bad.
To my family: my mother and father, Joan and John, and my three brothers, Jared, Nathan and Adam. Your unconditional love and support have given me the strength to write.
To Cristina. Your voice gives me courage to sing with my own. I love you.
Flesh is Funny
My mother was tinkering around with the sofa the other day
and the spring jumped up and bit her on the mouth.
They stitched her up so you can barely see the mark.
She remembered with me the time I split my eye open
on a baseball from my brother’s hand,
and the doctor’s office
and her fainting at the mercurochrome
on my face.
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