BUNNY03 // Zoe Tuck — Bedroom Vowel (Print; book)

$16.95

Release Date: June 6th, 2023

Category:

Description

Consisting of lyric love letters to friends and musings on daily desire, nostalgia, and thirst for connection, Bedroom Vowel traces the development of an everyday philosophy formed in the social life of a creative mind. An entire social world appears in these pages.

The poems in Bedroom Vowel are chatty and slippery, taking quick turns from casual conversation about breakfast to the commodification of identity. These are poems that frequently contemplate the sensuous qualities of language, and participate in them as a bulwark against (or a spell to transform) misfortune.

In Bedroom Vowel, Tuck uncovers the ugly feelings of living through a pandemic on capitalism’s watch. In equal measure, she delivers us an intimate portrait of the life she fashions around and against the zeitgeist.

Book design by Mike Corrao, with artwork by Audra Puchalski.

About the Author

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts. She is the author of Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light) and the chapbooks Vape Cloud of Unknowing (Belladonna*) and The Book of Bella (DoubleCross Press), the latter of which is bound in a dos-a-dos edition with Emily Hunerwadel’s Peach Woman. In addition to teaching private creative writing and literature classes, Zoe is the co-host of The But Also reading series with Britt Billmeyer-Finn and the co-editor of Hot Pink Magazine with Emily Bark Brown. Since 2019, she has been an active member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, where she has co-curated both the Close Distances and the In-Flux reading series. 

Praise

PRAISE FOR Bedroom Vowel
Zoe Tuck is a capacious and serious thinker and by turns funny, quiet, aggressive, intimate, digressive, diaristic, and sometimes, blue. Bedroom Vowel is a totally great read and offers nonstop action where we are told “My language wants to be perceived as strange by many but by some as not merely peculiar but peculiarly beautiful.” So many varied addresses and forms and in all of these poems she is loving the reader as much as the act of reading what she loves.
—Peter Gizzi
Composed and casual, colloquial and cultured, the poems of Bedroom Vowel address social isolation and poetry through modes of address and contexts of place, study, and friendships. This is a woven complex of associations made of the everyday, philosophy, queer sexuality, nostalgic reflection, and poetic influence. Tender with longing and life; delightful, funny and insightful.
—Hoa Nguyen
Bedroom Vowel is pressed full of life’s florality—full of romance, art, and friendship, the labor of love (much disrupted)— full, too, of grief for a sci-fi array of unlived selves, the poem not written because this poem was. This book is so charming I sort of wish Zoe Tuck could live her “applied utopianism” in plural, so she could fill libraries with these poems. Then again, maybe only this Tuck’s lifelong devotion to language would produce such precise attunement to the “…space between the toes/of the word where the tongue goes.” I’d stick around this timeline for that alone.
—Sophia Dahlin