Zachary Schomburg reads Friday, June 28, at Open Books.
Early in Pulver Maar, Zachary Schomburg tells the story of Wanda, who found a disembodied arm at the top of a mountain and “took out an ad in the newspaper./Whose arm? read the ad above a photograph/Wanda took of the arm. She wrote a song about it/on the piano, and sang the song out of her windows/every day. No one responded. No one claimed the/arm as their own.”
Schomburg, Portland’s most beloved surrealist poet, is known for work that—like “One Arm Wanda”—evokes a complex stew of emotions. Seemingly silly but carrying a strange emotional weight, his uneasy poems nod to a larger loneliness or disconnection.