By Reason of Breakings

ANDREW ZAWACKI is coeditor of the international journal Verse, a reviewer for the Boston Review and the Times Literary Supplement, and an editor of the anthology Afterwards: Slovenian Writing, 1945-1995. A former Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, he studies in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Zawacki combines the disciplined perception of a naturalist with the inspired perception of a poet. The elegiac and prophetic, the spartan adherence to specific detail, the vivid understanding of words as events, all recall Thoreau. But this 21st century author must grapple with a paradoxical idea of wilderness littered with petrochemical and astrophysical artifacts, a geography of the imagination where 'waves are stammering apocrypha and graffiti.' By Reason of Breakings is the work of one of our most gifted young American poets.