The Man Suit [Perfect Paperback]

Zachary Schomburg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2007

The Man Suit, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgangers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow.

Praise for The Man Suit:

"Zachary Schomburg's 'The Man Suit' comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days."
--Matthew Rohrer

"It is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, Rene Char and Pablo Neruda come most vividly to mind in this regard. With 'The Man Suit,' Zachary Schomburg, quietly but with deep conviction, begins to join their company. His book is a blessing."
--Donald Revell

"Zachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other."
--James Tate

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness. In "Postcard from the Arctic Ocean" the speaker can "make smoke signals/ by burning/ these postcards/ by the handful." With similarly flippant but persistent gestures, Schomburg pushes at the boundaries of logic. He asks for a willing suspension of disbelief and of order. Non sequitur and clever opposition govern this world: a homicidal monster– cum–TV celebrity is fired in favor of a "gorilla dressed in people clothes"; in "I'm Not Carlos," "tree machines" dial up the poem's speaker, calling him Carlos and demanding he hand over "the Man Suit." A poem called "I've Since Folded This Poem into an Airplane" admits Schomburg's comfort with the self-conscious and reflexive in poetry. If a few of these poems are slight, the best of them imbue whimsy with high emotional stakes, suggesting this collection's casualness has been carefully wrought. Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around. (Apr.)
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About the Author

Zachary Schomburg is the author of two books of poems, THE MAN SUIT (Black Ocean 2007) and SCARY, NO SCARY (Black Ocean 2009), and chapbooks including The Pond (Greying Ghost), I am a Small Boy (Factory Hollow), and Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene (Horseless Press). Forthcoming chapbooks include a collaboration with Emily Kendal Frey to be published in the fall of 2009 called Team Sad (Cinematheque Press) and translations from the Russian of Andrei Sen-Senkov to be published in 2010 called The Architect's Fly (Lightful Press). He co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Black Ocean; 1st edition (April 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977770931
• ISBN-13: 978-0977770939
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #257,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Man Suit, October 4, 2011

By 

Ronald Ray (Rockford, IL, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Man Suit (Perfect Paperback)

Zachary Schomburg is an amazing surreal poet, and this book showcases his mastery of his craft. As a reader I was transfixed, and couldn't put the book down. As a writer, I was inspired. If you're looking for the unusual, the original, the bizarre... buy this book! My only problem with it is that at 105 pages, I still wanted more.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Troubling, brilliant, deceptively playful, May 13, 2007

By 

Giddy Goody - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Man Suit (Perfect Paperback)

If you've been catching Schomburg's poems in the lit magazines the last few years, he may have SEEMED very similar to (even if always a shade or two more interesting than) other James Tate/Wave Books influenced male poets in their 20s and 30s: clever, quirky, accessible, smart, self-aware, a bit lyrical. But (a big "but"), when The Man Suit is read in total and you get a sense of Schomburg's overall poetic approach and project, you get it: there's much more going on, something closer to, I don't know, an Eastern European aesthetic, where a total private apocalypse could be following that fuzzy, cross-eyed bunny coming out of the magician's hat. There's a deep current of sadness underwriting this book ("The Monster Hour" being maybe the most devastating example), which makes its gentleness and personable humor so much more moving. Poets like Dean Young, Tony Hoagland and even Tate himself (at least since Worshipful Company of Fletchers) could certainly learn something about constraint, style and control from the Man Suit, which is, shockingly enough, Schomburg's first full-length collection. If you like Eugene Ostashevsky or Brent Cunningham's Ugly Duckling books, you'll probably also get into this title. I think it's got a better than 2:1 chance of being a total classic of our contemporary poetry era.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Collection!, December 11, 2007

By 

Duane Schneider (Des Moines, IA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Man Suit (Perfect Paperback)

It's criminal that no one has published Schomburg's collection before now. His poetry is funny, obsessive, unforgiving, but above all, inventive. If you want poems about sunsets or somebody's dull encounter with a variegated woodpecker, look elsewhere, but if you want to see the possibilities of poetry--poems that reach for something fresh & unattainable, stick with Schomburg. While the poems might be deemed surreal, they're also accessible, even on a first read. And they have the ability to stick, unlike some of the navel-gazing fluff being written these days. Loose connections to Strand or Tate or Simic could be made, but Schomburg is someone else entirely.