Customer Reviews

The Man Suit

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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.

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.

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.

Schomburg writes some of the most unusual poetry that I've ever seen. Perhaps I'm not as familiar with surreal poetry as I should be, but this is an entirely different animal. An animal with radial antennas for horns and the sixteenth century buried in it's tin foil fur. On toast. Schomburg's train of thought is surprising and wild. It's like watching Reagan at a presidential address suddenly do a striptease to the tune of Beethoven's moonlight sonata, you're riveted because what you see is so different from what you expect. Like a koan, you feel your brain reordering its synapses trying to keep up and make sense of things. Instinctively, you know it isn't gibberish. That's the wild thing. It feels like it makes sense, humorous and moving sense. This is definitely a collection that does not disappoint.

Man, with every poem I read, I found myself thinking, "God I wish I wrote that." Zach is such a natural---and he's brought a big, needed dose of funky freshness into today's poetry realm.

The themes in this book are interwoven with fabulous imagery into one giant beautiful tapestry of concepts that everyone should dwelve into, at least once in a while. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Schomburg's poems are always a delight to read, and this collection is no different. The poems are stark and startling, but always implore a refreshing sense of humor to call us back.

Do yourself a favor and grab a copy.

Zach Schomburg, right now I am living in your book, "Man Suit." I am swimming past the whale that ate your mother, coddling the blood-spattered

everythings from the archives of Lincoln, waiting for the white phone to ring--no, the black. In my dreams, your book comes back to me as the pet pug I never had. I will hold him in my lap, look into his gentle, almost too human face, coo a bit. Thanks for the trip, man.