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Poetry
Insectomania
Poems, Pictures, & Choice Words about Our Six-Legged Friends and Foes
By Zakariya, Sally
$12.95
You don't have to like bugs to enjoy Insectomania, the new book by poet Sally Zakariya. Billed as "Poems, Pictures, and Choice Words about Our Six-Legged Friends and Foes," Insectomania is a small gem, lavishly illustrated with 19th-century naturalist engravings and studded with wise and witty sayings about insects.
Zakariya admits she wasn't "one of those kids who spent hours in the backyard with a magnifying glass studying bugs." In fact, she says in the book's Introduction, she isn't particularly fond of insects, at least not most of them. But, she asks, "Who can fail to be moved by a life cycle that starts with years of grubbing, followed by a short span of mating, and then death. Rather like our own lives, writ small."
And that's where Zakariya's wry but thoughtful poems take off. Like them or not, in her poem "Likeness," she concludes of insects
And yet the cunningness of their
construction, the clever play of
part and purpose, merits admiration.
Zakariya's poems and articles have appeared in numerous journals, most recently in Third Wednesday, Evening Street Review, Theodate, and Southern Women's Review. A collection of her poems, Arithmetic, was published in 2011. Her poetry has won prizes from the Poetry Society of Virginia and the Virginia Writers Club. With an eye for the quirky illustration, Zakariya has designed and self-published illustrated alphabet books on food, literature, and anatomy. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, and blogs at www.ButDoesItRhyme.com.
Zakariya admits she wasn't "one of those kids who spent hours in the backyard with a magnifying glass studying bugs." In fact, she says in the book's Introduction, she isn't particularly fond of insects, at least not most of them. But, she asks, "Who can fail to be moved by a life cycle that starts with years of grubbing, followed by a short span of mating, and then death. Rather like our own lives, writ small."
And that's where Zakariya's wry but thoughtful poems take off. Like them or not, in her poem "Likeness," she concludes of insects
And yet the cunningness of their
construction, the clever play of
part and purpose, merits admiration.
Zakariya's poems and articles have appeared in numerous journals, most recently in Third Wednesday, Evening Street Review, Theodate, and Southern Women's Review. A collection of her poems, Arithmetic, was published in 2011. Her poetry has won prizes from the Poetry Society of Virginia and the Virginia Writers Club. With an eye for the quirky illustration, Zakariya has designed and self-published illustrated alphabet books on food, literature, and anatomy. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, and blogs at www.ButDoesItRhyme.com.
- Category
- Poetry
- ISBN (softcover)
- 978-1-935238-49-2
- e-ISBN
- 978-1-63464-030-5
- Author
- Zakariya, Sally
-
"Insectomania is as pleasing to my eye as to my mind, more accurately, to the memories part of it. Sally Zakariya's insectary of poems are personal and I am happy to find that we connect, though having never met, in a shared reality of insect experience. Quotes, quips, a cast of millions to draw from: Zakariya has assembled a rare treat. Insects abound. Here you will find them explicitly but safely stowed between page and stanza. Unless, of course, they're not." ~ KT I didn't know what to expect from a book titled Insectomania with pictures of bugs on the cover, by a perfectly respectable poet like Sally Zakariya. What a delight! Charming poems. Old-timey photos and drawings of every kind of insect under the sun, laced with "bug" quotes from writers like Emily Dickenson and David Foster Wallace. "Memory like a dark moth/brushes by/leaving the faintest trace" she writes in one reflective poem. "This morning I found you/stunned in the kitchen sink" she says in another. Her poems both capture the unfamiliar vantage points of these six-legged creatures and yet reminds us that we too are bug-like in our humanity. ~ CSW A college World Lit educator has blogged about Sally's earlier book, Arithmetic. You can read the post here. Read articles about Sally's work here.
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Insectomania
$12.95