Poet Rachel Zucker's work is known for its taut sense of urgency and the way it reflects her lived experience as a mother, wife and teacher in the United States. The Poetics of Wrongness consists of four lecture-essays, expanded from their original form as part of the 2016 Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry. Zucker defines the poetics of wrongness as a way of writing into her belief that being wrong is not the opposite of right; instead, it is an act of opposition itself, a seating of oneself at a table piled with so many "wrongs" that questioning the idea of "right" becomes inevitable.
In the first essay, Zucker (Soundmachine; The Pedestrians; Museum of Accidents) presents six "(anti-)tenets" of the poetics of wrongness, including: "Poetry should be timeless." She argues that some poems "will last and continue to be relevant, but the poetics of wrongness wants a poem that is hard to capture and hard to hold" and seeks poems "with a shelf life, made with living ingredients." Themes of time echo throughout the collection; the book itself arrives on shelves after years of Zucker reworking her essays. This gap tangles with Zucker's assertion that "no writing exists outside of its moment." Leaning into this uncertainty, she urges readers, "Stay with me, stay in the present, this moment, for a moment," then assures them: "This is relevant." Zucker tackles such issues as feminism, confessional poetry, motherhood, bodies and time. And in all, she has written essays made with living ingredients, hard to capture, perhaps, but fascinating to behold. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian