It’s factored
Up in there
The fabricatory
Humming
On all the time
To move it out
The order
Whistle zone
Floor world
Kinetic ranch
Nation state
Size of
A fluoride nucleus
GDP of
Collapsing star
*****
We're ringing in 2026 correctly and excellently with Zach Peckham's debut full-length, "As If And." Books ship 2/1.
Buy a copy through 1/19 and get ~33% off. If that doesn't entice you, read all of the great things people have to say about "As If And":
"As its title suggests, language in Zach Peckham's As If And is both elemental and photonic, pulsing out and bouncing back from the first bang that produced us; complete in itself, blown apart; sped-up and slow; profound as a pun and subtle as a punch; holding everything together; spilling its guts. These poems mark a time away from harm within a time defined by harm, our here and now, where each of us watches for our face in the clouds as the climate watches itself break apart in the lake. In the heartbreaking lake."
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles
As If And is a splintered, thrilling sink into the linguistic hijinks of systems incompetence, labor hypocrisy, and “the literal it.” Zach Peckham’s ear is stellar, offering jokes within jokes, “increasingly mirrored” mumblecore, and a line’s real-time iterations via the “cell / ’s un- / coupling // slip / -page.” In this book, language is both brash and tenderly parsed; “this in / vent /-ion’s // in cent / -ive for / a pro // -cess of / disinteg- / rations” offering us a noise poetics amassed from scrap parts. We tumble thorough the music of multi-hinged syntaxes, cracked syllables, and re-foldable grammar as poems track the gritty, the limited, and the ick. Zach Peckham’s As If And is punk as shit.
—Caryl Pagel, author of Free Clean Fill Dirt
Zach Peckham's prismatic slippages offer a “purse of reverb” that simmers and singes through opulent static and spectacular dooms. The poems in As If And are blooperprone, pandora-ramic, fractal and haptic and darkly rhapsodic. They brim with “sonic wrongs” that nevertheless reel toward something like “a hopeful song.” This is the poetry of grand fracture and “resplendent detuning,” and through it Peckham has confected a “chimera lucida” that is as radiant as a telescope of lightning.
—Zach Savich, author of A Field of Telephones
*****
Zach Peckham is the author of the chapbook "cycle hum" (Sistrum Books, 2025) and his poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Annulet, APARTMENT, Oversound, Always Crashing, Poetry Northwest, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. He has held editorial positions with the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and the Cleveland Review of Books, and has taught at Cleveland State, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Colby College. He runs the small press Community Mausoleum and the journal Coma. As If And is his first full-length collection, and at the time of its publication he is the Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer-in-Residence at Colby College.
