Monday After the End of the World

Jim Zola has made an art of finding the sublime in the everyday. His writing is a guide to our shared past and present-a gift for the future. The collection, Monday After the End of the World, explores themes of love, loss, happiness, and sorrow, with a filter born of observation and inspiration, and his lush, poignant writing compels us to look around us, and really take in what we are seeing. While watching his words dance, the reader knows that these are poems to be savored, and read again and again, and discovered anew every time we turn the page. Joe Newberry, musician, and songwriterJim Zola's poems, often dreamy and nostalgic, are concerned with beauty and sadness and yearning for what we know, but can't entirely see or say. Through powerful image-making and original language, the poet weaves emotional textures, the parts of the experience that are so hard to pin down and that make poetry so necessary. Zola is preoccupied with accessing and articulating what's true-the essential, and the enduring. If there is a theme here, it could well be that "No one easily survives love," as the poet says. Elsewhere, he tells us, "I practice love by call and response." I would add that these poems call out to us, and we cannot help but respond.- Antonia Clark, author of Chameleon Moon and Dance Craze