Rachel Zucker

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Poetry

Rachel Zucker

Past Event: Monday, November 14, 2016

At McCaw Hall — Nesholm Family Lecture Hall

A poem is never going to be a copy of the real world or a mirror—it’s always a translation of experience and another experience in and of itself. Even seemingly unaltered photographs are composed and exposed, developed and printed in ways that mediate ‘the body of real things’ but, yes, I think there is truth in poetry. Truth in the sense of an attempt, not an absolute.

— Rachel Zucker

Zucker’s name-naming, carping, merciless, and gloriously human body of work thus far suggests that any full account of being an individual has to register how specimen-like and interchangeable our lives often seem.

— Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

Rachel Zucker may be Generation X’s likeliest heir to the confessional legacy of Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds . . . [S]he matches desperate, pained self-revelation with breakneck lines that spill in and out of long-lined verse and writhing prose.

— Craig Morgan Teicher, the Believer

Award-winning poet Rachel Zucker will give a lecture entitled “The Poetics of Wrongness.”

Rachel Zucker was born in New York and grew up in Greenwich Village, the daughter of novelist Benjamin Zucker and storyteller Diane Wolkstein. She earned her BA at Yale University and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The author of nine books, her most recent works include the double collection of prose and poetry, The Pedestrians (2014), and Museum of Accidents (2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and MOTHERs (2013), a memoir narrating her complicated path to motherhood. With Arielle Greenberg, Zucker co-authored Home/birth: A Poemic (2010), a cross-genre nonfiction book about birth, friendship, and feminism.

Zucker’s numerous awards include the 1999 Salt Hill Poetry Award, the 2000 Barrow Street Poetry Prize, the 2002 Center for Book Arts Award and, in 2012, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in many journals including: 3rd Bed, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Columbia Review, Court Green, Epoch, Fence, Iowa Review, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner as well as in several anthologies including Not for Mothers Only, Legitimate Dangers, Best American Poetry 2001 and Best American Poetry 2014.

A certified labor doula and childbirth educator, Rachel Zucker lives in New York with her husband and sons, where she teaches at NYU and the 92nd Street Y.

real poem (personal statement)

I skim sadness like fat off the surface
of cooling soup. Don’t care about
metaphor but wish it would arrive
me. There’s a cool current of air
this hot day I want to ride.
I have no lover, not even my love.
I have no other, not even I.

Selected Works:

Poetry
The Pedestrians (2014)
Museum of Accidents (2009)
The Bad Wife Handbook (2007)T
he Last Clear Narrative (2004)
Eating in the Underworld (2003)

Nonfiction
MOTHERs (2014)
Home/birth: a poemic (2010)

Links

Rachel Zucker’s Website
An Interview with Kenyon Review
An Interview with LA Review of Books
Mother Tongue: Poetry and Prose by Rachel Zucker
Poetry Foundation: Rachel Zucker

Event Details

McCaw Hall — Nesholm Family Lecture Hall

321 Mercer St
Seattle, WA 98109

View directions.

This event will be held in the Nesholm Family Lecture Hall. The Lecture Hall is located in the lower level of Marion Oliver McCaw Hall at Seattle Center. The entrance to the hall is on the north side of the building and east of the main entrance; it directly faces Mercer St. and the door is under the bridge to the Mercer Street Garage.

Transportation & Parking

By Car

  • From I-5
    Take Mercer Street exit (exit 167) and go straight onto Mercer Street westbound. Turn right onto 4th Avenue. Turn left to park in the Seattle Center Mercer Street Garage.
  • From Aurora/Hwy 99 Northbound
    Take the Western Avenue exit. Continue straight on Western Avenue. Turn right onto Battery Street. Turn left onto 1st Avenue. Turn right on Mercer Street. Continue down Mercer Street to drop off patrons directly in front of McCaw Hall, or turn left on 3rd or 4th Avenues to park in the Seattle Center Mercer Street Garage.
  • From Aurora/Hwy 99 Southbound
    Exit right on Roy Street. Turn left on 3rd Avenue North. Turn left to park in the Seattle Center Mercer Street Garage or proceed to the corner of 3rd Avenue and Mercer Street, turn left and proceed immediately to the far right lane to drop off patrons directly in front of McCaw Hall.

By Bus
Bus routes with Seattle Center stops include: 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 33, and 82. For more information about the routes nearest you, call Metro’s 24-hour Rider Information hotline at (206) 553-3000 or visit Metro online.

Parking
Parking is available at the Mercer Street Garage, conveniently located across the street from McCaw Hall. A covered skybridge provides easy access between level C of the garage and McCaw Hall.

Other garages and parking options are:

  • Fisher Plaza Garage, located in the KOMO Plaza on 4th Avenue N, between Broad St and John St. The entrance is at 451 John St. The quickest way to get to McCaw Hall from here is to walk across the Seattle Center campus, starting from the Space Needle. SAL offers a $5 voucher for this garage. Vouchers may be picked up at SAL’s box office or info table.
  • 5th Avenue North Garage, located at the corner of 5th Avenue and Harrison Street. This is the first garage you will encounter after exiting I-5 and turning onto Harrison Street. It is a 3-block walk to McCaw Hall from this garage.
  • Surface lots are available on either side of Mercer Street between 3rd and 1st Avenues.
  • Southwest Seattle Center garages, for those willing and able to make the short walk across the Seattle Center campus, there are garages located on 1st Avenue North between Thomas and John Streets (south of KeyArena), at the corner of Warren Avenue North and Denny Way (adjacent to the church), and on 2nd Avenue North and Denny Way (adjacent to Pacific Science Center).

Accessibility

All of our venues have accessible seating and listening devices available. Click here for more information about accessibility and ADA services at McCaw Hall.

Please contact us at sal@lectures.org or 206.621.2230 x10 for more details and to let us know you’re coming so we can better accommodate your needs.

Seating Chart