Beautiful Zero: Poems

By Jennifer Willoughby

From love and war to Shark Week and college football, this award-winning poetry collection “makes both the marvelous and quotidian buzz with brilliance” (Matt Rasmussen).

Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems of this award-winning debut are filled with explosive wit and humor like “a knife you don’t see coming.” A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through Beautiful Zero, embracing forms of culture high and low in effort to finding meaning in the chaos.

A series of poems set in a Kaiser Permanente hospital tear into the world of privatized health care while simultaneously charting a story of love in the face of catastrophe. Yet even at her most surreal, Willoughby always finds the pulsing heart at the core of the poem. She embraces what she cannot understand about both the world and herself because after all, “Nothing is as random as they say it is. / You were born the weirdo that you are.”

Winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781571319425

Book preview

[image: cover]

© 2015, Text by Jennifer Willougby

© 2015, Cover art by Mary Austin Speaker

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

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www.milkweed.org

Published 2015 by Milkweed Editions

Printed in Canada

Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

Cover photo/illustration by Mary Austin Speaker

Author photo by Kurt Gegenhuber

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First Edition

Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Willoughby, Jennifer, 1970-

[Poems. Selections]

Beautiful zero : poems / Jennifer Willoughby.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-57131-480-2 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-57131-942-5 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS3623.I57765A6 2016

811’.6--dc23

2015022371

Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Beautiful Zero

Reviews for Beautiful Zero

[Mick Archer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book knocks me out. I read it out loud to my girlfriend and she, who never reads poetry, is knocked out too.