“Zvi Sesling pays attention to the world, the larger world as well as the smaller world, and what he says about both is worth hearing.”
Lawrence Kessenich, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
Selected & New Poems
Zvi A. Sesling’s poems are a reckoning with and an honoring of life itself. Similar to the character in his poem “Collector of Calamities,” accomplished poet, fiction writer, and editor Sesling offers his own “record of lives extinguished like flames” in his tightly crafted and resonant New and Selected Poems. The collection spans work from eight previous books published by six different presses since 2010 and includes a handful of new poems. Much variety appears when one brings together work from multiple books into a single volume. In doing so, readers best discover what has most occupied a poet throughout his career. For Sesling, it is evident it has been humanity and its horrors, but also music, art, baseball, love and its lovers… Underscoring the lives of those destroyed by the Holocaust, international war, domestic tragedy, antisemitism, racism, and hatred, Sesling’s work abhors and condemns evil, but it also recognizes the oft-reviled underbelly of society while gloriously lifting its head to admire what startling beauty exists. With allusions to Carl Sandburg, Dylan Thomas, and others, and striking and unforgettable imagery—wine glasses hung upside down like bats or stars that appear like popped corn—Sesling intimately renders tender moments with nostalgia—and often his signature bite. Zvi A. Sesling’s New and Selected Poems is a volume that fixes the reader’s gaze on horrors and manages to still leave us with gratitude and elation for the wonderous.
~ Deirdre Fagan author of Phantom Limbs and Find a Place for Me
Zvi's poetry is as rich as his long life. He brings baseball to the high holy; he looks back with fondness and amusement about his past loves, his travels, and his travails. His poetry is always accessible, but there is a profound rumbling under the surface of his work. Zesling’s poetry is guaranteed to bring a laugh, a tear, a smile to the reader's face... and most of all a perspective—a horizon for our own journeys.
~ Doug Holder former co-president of the New England Poetry Club
“Zvi Sesling is the master of the narrative poem ending with a surprise and wise last line. Wait for it.”
~ Rosie Rosenzweig A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la