Aleks Zywicki’s ZOUNDS! is a meditative exploration of a lifelong relationship with God,
religion, and devotion. “Zounds” is a contraction combining “God’s” and “wounds,” an early
modern exclamation that often edges towards blasphemy, and a literal evocation of Christ’s
crucifixion wounds. In these poems of family, love, and longing, ZOUNDS! also captures the
experience of sonic and existential rupture, the wounds sustained in an enduring struggle with
faith.
Zounds, Aleksander Zywicki
$18.00
ISBN: 978-1-962131-11-7
Binding: Paperback
Published: October 15, 2025
What a thrill it has been to come upon this book. Aleksander Zywicki’s sensibility—his off-
kilter rhythms, his surprising collisions of image and sound, the many ways these poems snap
closed at their ends—is brilliant and utterly original. In ZOUNDS! Zywicki meditates on the
vagaries of memory and the divine, the certainties of mortality, and the complexities of living
among other complex, often unreachable people. Always at work in these poems is a keen,
scalpel-like intelligence slicing away in search of something like truth. And always present, too,
is that musician’s sense of song that lives inside language. This is a formidable debut. —Kevin Prufer, Judge of the 2024 Barrow Street Press Book Prize and author of The Fears
In a voice as steady and incantatory as prayer, the spare, penetrating poems of Aleks
Zywicki’s ZOUNDS! unfold down their pages. These are meditations on a complicated grief,
and the casual cruelties and disappointments of being human—those that find us, and
those we make of ourselves. But even as the voice edges toward the stoic, it softens with a
warm reverence for life’s modest joys, and the strange wonder that is our life on earth.
Turning from one object of devotion to the next—family, god, love, labor, the natural
world—these poems tunnel to the heart of faith’s lonely edifice, searching, earnestly, for
something worth believing in. —Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses
Aleksander Zywicki’s arresting debut sweeps like a lighthouse beam across the jagged surfaces
of a life. The tumbling, mostly unpunctuated lines of ZOUNDS! evoke the slipperiness of
memory while still feeling tethered to a stark present: “suddenly it is the hour / when god is
peeled from your tongue.” While death, family dysfunction, and lapsed faith are foundational to
much of this collection (“chaos gathers each night / into the ghost of my father”), they are
countered by a sense of hope as the poet builds a future with his wife and young daughter. These
restless, bracingly intelligent poems seem to recognize that it is not necessarily their job to make
sense of the world, yet in mysterious and unexpected ways, they do. —Mark Bibbins, author of 13th Balloon
the sign of the cross
in the name of the forehead
& of the sternum & of the left
& right shoulders respectively
& sometimes improvised
with lips at the end & a pinch
of nothing held to the sky
& sometimes mirrored
the shape drawn in plumes
of smoke & ceremony
& sometimes twitched
over & again a compulsion
to ward off tragedy
dialing God they called it
when they taught me
crossing yourself as though
way up upon a tightrope
strung between
the common tongue
& prayer we walk
to bless the body
as with a spell
an alchemy not
otherwise afforded
to such ordinary hands
whatever it is called
it is always Easter
in the picture where
my dead father has risen
his arm to hang
the wrenching Christ
above our dinner table
& my eyes like wounds
are always opened
as if with dreadful secrecy
I had witnessed blood
dripping into the food
Aleksander Zywicki was raised in Bayonne, New Jersey. He holds an MFA from The New
School and his work appears in: Plume, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, Seneca Review, Shō
Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Aleks has received a poetry fellowship from the Martha’s
Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and a teaching fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare
Library. He teaches English and creative writing at The Hudson School.
