Zana Previti is a writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
Providence
Finishing Line Press, 2017 BUY THE BOOK
Cover art by Doug Kiklowicz
Surely every poem desires to be read and read again. Zana Previti’s poems deserve it. The poems of Zana Previti’s first collection, Providence, possess the rare capacity to make the personal appear universal and the universal appear personal. She blends present and historical time, immediate and distant place, and she applies layer after layer of rich details in lines that vary from a terse, trimeter-like pace to Whitmanic lines that threaten to sweep beyond the margins.
Ron McFarland, author of Subtle Thieves (Pecan Grove Press, 2012) and Stranger in Town: New and Selected Poems (Confluence Press, 2000), among others. He teaches at the University of Idaho.
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In language at once spare and unsparing, Zana Previti’s staggeringly wide-ranging and pitch-perfect Providence takes us from the “immense / old age of the Atlantic” through war-time starvation experiments, family, Kung Fu movies, Greek myth, bathtub mystery novel reading, a Galveston hurricane, environmental degradation, and King Lear—reckoning in deeply humane ways with individual and historically-aware questions of the human capacity for suffering and love. “These stones are the generations / upon which we build images of the end of us,” she writes, using her formal and lyrical skills to again and again find these “images of the end” and their complex corollaries in our continuance and living. “Kill us if you will / but kill us in the light,” Ajax is quoted as crying, and this poem—which is like nothing you’ve ever quite seen before—is a new, acute light.
Alexandra Teague, author of the poetry collections The Wise and Foolish Builders (Persea Books, 2015) and Mortal Geography (Persea Books, 2010), which won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry and the 2010 California Book Award. In 2011 she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
About
Zana Previti is a writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. She is the author of the chapbook Providence (Finishing Line Press, 2017); her first novel The Chilling Simple will be released in October 2018 by the University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press. In 2014, she was named the recipient of Poetry International‘s C.P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry and a Tin House Summer Fiction Conference Scholar. She has served as the Fall 2016 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona, and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes.
Zana was born and raised in New England, where she graduated from from Wellesley College. She earned her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Idaho. She now lives, teaches, and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Photo Credit
The beautiful header photo (as well as the cover art for Providence), of a Colorado river between Snowmass and Carbondale, was taken by Doug Kiklowicz, a photographer, writer, and artist. You can find more of his work @kiklowicz.
