Overview

Centered around loss and death of individuals, relationships, and ways of communicating, the poems of zirconium ash drive at intensified high speed, physically and psychically mapping the geography of the city of Los Angeles. Weaving and zigzagging, mingling grief, sorrow, and lament, the poems haunt and are haunted by the living and dead. The culture of the city and family history often blur in these poems, which can feel in conversation with themselves as well as others-fragmented ghost narratives that lyrically confront history, poetics, and the crimes and unjust actions of government.

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9798990014992

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Reviews

Freeway poems, a driver's night soliloquies refracting city lights through gleaming obsidian glass, ""78 on the 90 & searching for my abuelito's voice""--glancing backwards once in a while, jimmy vega is glimpsed in the rearview mirror, our gaze crosses his. These freeways loop through dreams and regrets, memories and grief. ""95 on the 105""--we're driving through the dark with headlights switched off--a Thomas Guide abandoned under the seat after Google maps appeared on everyone's phone, revised here as the jimmy vega Guide. You'll recognize the freeways at night and the signs. You'll recognize this inner city. In these poems L.A. is always on fire. -Sesshu Foster, AUTHOR OF ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines There is an incandescent calm at the core of jimmy vega's tumbling, raging, epic freeway lyrics. The poems map Los Angeles, a ""city rot with ghosts,"" family history, as well as the crimes of the U.S. government. I feel the tendril traces of Wanda Coleman here, where city pavement is as much a canvas for what is spilled, as these pages are for capturing grief, anger, despair. These poems keen and are anthem-I wish I had this book to keep me company during my formative years living in LA.-Diana Khoi Nguyen, AUTHOR OF Root Fractures From the stunning ars-poetica-as-freeway opener to the sleeping angel ""on blue / graphite pavement"" of its penultimate lines, zirconium ash performs an exorcism of the self, a reckoning of civic amnesia, a ""five-car collision"" of things ever on the verge of being lost to the stupor of Los Angeles, a ""city persimmon in afterglow."" As this rebellion of the senses gives way to shades of marigold, wildfire, and carbon monoxide, jimmy vega encounters his own suffering and arrested breath in that of family separations, police brutality, lethal air-borne elements, and concussive, algorithmic low-theory deliriums, drawing us ever closer and in concert with these vatic, expansive poems, such that ""i can almost taste the snare of my own language.""-Roberto Tejada, AUTHOR OF Carbonate of Copper zirconium ash is a hole-punched sheaf of watch reports from vigils at the bedsides of the dead and dying; thus, everyone everywhere, though especially Los Angeles. jimmy vega perches there red-eyed and teeth uncollected as the ailing breathe in ""skid row piss cigarette / freeway carcass splat ash""-then, breathed out as cempasúchtil ash, the book's incremental refrain and evidence of ecological, sociopolitical, and personal fortunes ""in graveyard motion."" Ashes, ashes, we all crawl down the 710, the 5, the 91, these the rivers vega's known, charred under the same ""endless sun"" that's surveilled Herrera, Coleman, Bukowski, and 150 years of riots. The same sun stink-eyeing everyone everywhere now. With these delirious yet lucid poems, vega stands in that light and he doesn't even squint.-Douglas Kearney, AUTHOR OF I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always

Author Information

jimmy vega is the child of Mexican immigrants, a Chicano Los Angeles poet, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. vega is the author of zirconium ash (What Books Press, 2025). He holds a BA from UCLA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts. vega's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Diode, Dunce Codex, Maintenant, and elsewhere. vega is currently the Associate Director of Beyond Baroque Literary / Arts Center. He lives and works in Los Angeles. More @jimmyyvega or jimmy-vega.com

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