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City of Regret a Zone 3 Press Book by Andrew Kozma

City of Regret

  • Andrew Kozma
  • Andrew Kozma

Is it a statement absorbing all questions. Look out
at the darkness beyond the streetlamp. Who undresses
their hands to feel the raw snow while still miles from home?

During an average lifetime enough skin and hair is shed
to create ourselves several times over. where are these
empty spaces? Who have I stepped away from?

It’s too late for breakfast, call it what you will. A treatise
on the life cycle is incomplete if it doesn’t say “simple cellulose
can not be absorbed without attendant organisms, without
arrangements

of stomachs filtering in sequence.” With the cropped grass
come some stunned butterflies, blind from the sun’s
sudden eclipse. There is always some beauty to be understood

only through digestion. The body itself is a corporation
of vested self-interests, the bacteria in balance with the blood,
the clotted marrow ending in the tiny blue tongues of veins.

  • About Andrew Kozma
  • Andrew Kozma received an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He was born in Tucson, Arizona, but only lived there nine months, so your guess is as good as his as to where he’s from. His poems have been published in AGNI On-line, Weave, Subtropics, Forklift, Ohio, and Grist, and his prose has been published in The Iowa Review and NANO Fiction. His first book of poems, City of Regret, was chosen by Richard Jackson for the Zone 3 First Book Award and was published in 2007.
  • In Praise of City of Regret
  • “In Andrew Kozma’s poems, the world is intriguingly askew: ‘The desert sky opens like the mouth of a dying fish.’ Cafés undress, walls merge with air, and rooms speak, sometimes even returning one’s gaze, projecting strange images that will shadow you like portraits whose eyes follow you around the room and even into the street. Kozma is at his best evoking those odd moments of disorientation when the stuff of your life transforms, seeming to submerge into a matrix of dream—‘those moments air becomes solid and you stare through ice / like a man in a glacier.’” —J. Allyn Rosser
City of Regret a Zone 3 Press Book by Andrew Kozma

City of Regret

  • Andrew Kozma
  • 10.00
  • Poetry
  • Poet will Eat Himself

Is it a statement absorbing all questions. Look out
at the darkness beyond the streetlamp. Who undresses
their hands to feel the raw snow while still miles from home?

During an average lifetime enough skin and hair is shed
to create ourselves several times over. where are these
empty spaces? Who have I stepped away from?

It’s too late for breakfast, call it what you will. A treatise
on the life cycle is incomplete if it doesn’t say “simple cellulose
can not be absorbed without attendant organisms, without
arrangements

of stomachs filtering in sequence.” With the cropped grass
come some stunned butterflies, blind from the sun’s
sudden eclipse. There is always some beauty to be understood

only through digestion. The body itself is a corporation
of vested self-interests, the bacteria in balance with the blood,
the clotted marrow ending in the tiny blue tongues of veins.

City of Regret

  • Andrew Kozma
  • 10.00
  • Poetry
City of Regret a Zone 3 Press Book by Andrew Kozma
  • Poet will Eat Himself

Is it a statement absorbing all questions. Look out
at the darkness beyond the streetlamp. Who undresses
their hands to feel the raw snow while still miles from home?

During an average lifetime enough skin and hair is shed
to create ourselves several times over. where are these
empty spaces? Who have I stepped away from?

It’s too late for breakfast, call it what you will. A treatise
on the life cycle is incomplete if it doesn’t say “simple cellulose
can not be absorbed without attendant organisms, without
arrangements

of stomachs filtering in sequence.” With the cropped grass
come some stunned butterflies, blind from the sun’s
sudden eclipse. There is always some beauty to be understood

only through digestion. The body itself is a corporation
of vested self-interests, the bacteria in balance with the blood,
the clotted marrow ending in the tiny blue tongues of veins.

  • About Andrew Kozma
  • Andrew Kozma received an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He was born in Tucson, Arizona, but only lived there nine months, so your guess is as good as his as to where he’s from. His poems have been published in AGNI On-line, Weave, Subtropics, Forklift, Ohio, and Grist, and his prose has been published in The Iowa Review and NANO Fiction. His first book of poems, City of Regret, was chosen by Richard Jackson for the Zone 3 First Book Award and was published in 2007.
  • In Praise of City of Regret
  • “In Andrew Kozma’s poems, the world is intriguingly askew: ‘The desert sky opens like the mouth of a dying fish.’ Cafés undress, walls merge with air, and rooms speak, sometimes even returning one’s gaze, projecting strange images that will shadow you like portraits whose eyes follow you around the room and even into the street. Kozma is at his best evoking those odd moments of disorientation when the stuff of your life transforms, seeming to submerge into a matrix of dream—‘those moments air becomes solid and you stare through ice / like a man in a glacier.’” —J. Allyn Rosser
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