Marilyn Zuckerman received a BA in 1971 from Sarah Lawrence college after studying within the Horace Gregory Writing Program. In 1974, Zuckerman was awarded an MA in poetry and teaching from Goddard College's graduate program.

Kenneth Koch and Kay Boyle at the New School in NYC; Grace Paley and Jane Cooper at Sarah Lawrence; and Jean Valentine at Goddard College were her teachers. Marilyn has been published within the small press in anthologies, in the New York Quarterly and via many other publications. Marilyn has had four previous books of poetry published; Personal Effects, Monday Morning Movie, Poems of the Sixth Decade, and Marilyn Zuckerman Greatest Hits: 1970-2000. She has also been the recipient of a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.

"Zuckerman juxtaposes our rich and often willful U.S. American landscape of the world upon which we impose such a negative influence yet before which we are conditioned to turn away. She does this with keen observation, lyric grace and exceptional poetic power," --Margaret Randall

My thoughts were, as I began reading the lucid clarity of Marilyn Zuckerman's lines; 'How long has she been gazing toward the mountain? Was that cinnamon she preferred in her tea, not sugar and lemon?' There is an epiphany within these pages, an accomplished honesty after confronting the inevitable truth, after wrestling the fury strength of an archangel whose benevolent demeanor has changed into armed warrior in the twinkling of that proverbial blink.

Marilyn Zuckerman has earned her self-assertiveness through pathos, the life experiences which tempered inwardly, to prove her deep underlying strengths.

I do not feel culpable when my pen writes these commensurable lines. You will find not one shred of bathos within "amerika/america"; no triteness, no flatness, no insincerity. Her style and poetic voice are her own; the richness of life experience has that inconvertibility of an unearthed Java woman who has been given another chance, after being doused with jellied gasoline (naplam), to ply innate talents.

--Walking the Beach At Key West (1994, a contract has been taken out on the poor)--

How can this happen in your country?
Paola asks.

We have to begin again,
I say.
Joe Hill must die,
the Triangle fire burn
bodies with rags tied around their heads
fall from windows like bolts of cloth.
smash to the pavement like flesh and blood,
while others sit scorched before sewing machines,
their feet still on the treadles....

--Quatrains: In Tempore Belli--

He said, I should stop writing anti-male poems.
I said I would when there was no rape,
when women weren't killed by their lovers
out of rage or for the insurance money.

The guy whose bumper sticker says "USA Love it or Leave it"
weaves in and out of traffic and cuts me off.
My bumper shows the broken gun of a peace worker;
still, I give him the finger, would dearly love to kill him.

--Christmas in New York: More Quatrains--

Tonight two people I love are dying while an old woman
wrapped in shawls sleeps in the snow outside my window.
So why those shrill bells outside Bloomindale's,
the heartless whoosh of its revolving door?

Outside FAO Schwartz, on 57th Street
that battered train of oversize cartons is somebody's home.
There!--a shabby blanket, a dirty hand,
a cap full of holes, thrust out.

--Soho, NY: 1980--

Mornings at the loft in Soho
I awake to the sound of heavy lorries
banging against the curb and energetic machismo--

Last night
a rain filled with volcanic ash and poison waste
fell on the yellow tomcat of Mercer Street
howling in the gutter--

I think of my grandfather
newly arrived from Russia,
a man of thirty cutting cloth
in rooms like these until
his red-veined eyes film over.

I can feel the steady, but erratic, heartbeat pulse of America in these poems, the societal concern, the mixture of pride with shame, as one watches once hopeful things employed wrongly.

As word flow, I feel that I am in under the careful tutelage of a patroon, the sole proprietor of a luxurious manorial estate of poetry, where words which cascade outward have been polished with a finely bristled aesthetic brush to add a certain underlying patina glow.

I want to read many more books by this poet. Marilyn has miles to go before she dare rest. Zuckerman may believe she is caught in the painful throe of another cherry orchard as she identifies with Anton Chekov and her Russian forebears, but she is, in reality, the voice of the poor, without regard to nationality, who live only to make ends meet, to make the rich richer, as they wear earned wrinkles with pride.

I highly recommend buying "amerika/america," and I suggest shopping around to locate more of Marilyn Zuckerman's books. She has written, and has been presented a PEN award, for her fiction. One added factor to speed you to the e-mail shop on line, Marilyn in her own words:

--In A Rented Car in the Middle of the Mojave Desert--

No, here I am at last, behind the wheel in a country as empty as when
the pioneers crossed this desert, and the Indians made their petro-
glyphs, speeding to meet my sister in Lone Pine where we will link
up like Thelma and Louise to spend my seventieth birthday at Death
Valley--a touch of hubris and gallows humor that overturns T&L's final
self-destruction.

Bravo. Bellismio! More!

Copyright 01/15-03 Joyce Metzger