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Poetry

A masterful and engaging work. Zane Kotker has utilized a life’s worth of experience and the trained sense of a novelist to create a clear and poignant collection of poems.   —  Massachusetts Center for the Book

Poems From: Old Ladies in the Locker Room and Pool, Finishing Line Press, June 2011

Order from Finishing Line Press

images (3)

old-ladies-in-the-locker-room-and-pool

 

Driving the Bay Road Home

Even today I’m apt to think
maybe I’ll buy that house
get married
have a couple of kids
especially in March when driving
the Bay Road home
late in the afternoon with snow
around and blue clouds going plum
as the sun’s not quite down
and then I remember —
I’ve done all that:
the house is mine,
the husband dead, the children grown.

Hear Zane read it below:

http://zanekotker.com/wp-content/uploads/Driving-the-Bay-Road.m4a

 

 

Margot, First Among Us

All while you are dying, I am living:
sun burns down through yellow leaves,
steam rises,
earth lies ready to receive.

Air slips into the bellows of our lungs —
that’s all you do now, breathe,
and carry on the hidden chemistries,
while I hear crickets in the field,
tea simmering,
taste apples firm as jicama,
feel floor flat against bare foot.

Giver of gifts, you give this last, to be.
Opener of doors, you open first and go.

Hear Zane read it below:

http://zanekotker.com/wp-content/uploads/Margot-First-Among-Us.mp3

 
Billions I Have Never Known

Here I am in this dark room
alone with car lights on the wall.
No, not alone.
There’s the viburnum planted
in the morning, some ruddy buds
of dogwood near the road,
phone numbers of my children in my head,
and all the dead.

Billions I never knew,
could not contain –
yet secret in my DNA, they lead me
back and back among Olduvai’s bones,
to standing up, to using tools, to frontal sex.
These are my family now,
the ones who keep me company.
Goodnight, I say to them. And then, goodnight.

Hear Zane read it below:

http://zanekotker.com/wp-content/uploads/Billions-I-Have-Never-Known.mp3

 

 

Old Ladies in the Locker Room and Pool

Locker Room: Artists’ Assessment

Intent on anecdote and getting dry,
we naked ladies stroll about the locker room,
toweling pendulous guts and grain-fed haunches,
unperturbed by flesh that hangs off arms
still damp from Windex-colored water soft as air–
Lucien Freud has nothing on us ladies here.

Young women move among us like gods;
mothers with one and two-year olds
sundress the perfect bodies at their knees,
pull bathing suits up over training pants,
crooning don’t fuss, good job, good job
then shed their own cocoons of winter wool.
So beautiful they are, their rounded forms,
we understand Renoir, forgive his repetitions,
try to grasp exactly how we got from them to us.

Hear Zane read it below:

http://zanekotker.com/wp-content/uploads/Old-Ladies-Part-1-2.m4a

 

 

Listen here for Zane Kokter’s interview
with Daisy Mathias on Poetry A’ La Carte November 2012.

http://zanekotker.com/wp-content/uploads/Poetry-a-la-Carte-Interview.mp3

 

In The News


May 9, 2018

Zane Kotker presents The Boy Who Walked to Distant Lands at Northampton's new center for the arts.

The author with the book's designer Randy Zucco


April 2017

On the 18th, Zane read from Goodnight, Ladies at a private house party on Cape Cod.

April 8th, a corner of my table at the Easthampton Book Fest:


January 2017

Goodnight, Ladies is now available as an ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Plus and iTunes.

On the 14th and 15th, Zane Kotker read from Goodnight, Ladies at the White Square bookshop in Easthampton, MA.


Reading at the White Square

Signing books at the White Square

On the 11th, Zane read from Goodnight, Ladies at Forbes Library.

Signing books at the Forbes Library.

On the 8th, Zane read from Goodnight, Ladies at a house party in South Hadley, MA.

December, 2016

Zane Kotker read from Goodnight, Ladies at the Northampton Senior Center.

Zane Kotker read new poems at the Broadside bookshop, joining other contributors to the latest publication of The Gallery of Readers Press, Celebrating Writers of the Pioneer Valley Anthology 2017.

October, 2016

Zane Kotker read from Goodnight, Ladies at the Easthampton Lathrop community on the 7th, at a house party for the book in Lexington, MA on the 17th and at the Northampton Lathrop community on the 21st.

September 7, 2016

Zane Kotker presents her new novella Goodnight, Ladies, at the Broadside Bookshop, 247 Main Street,
Northampton, MA. image

September 6, 2016

WHMP’s Bill Newman interviews Zane Kotker on his morning program, calling Goodnight, Ladies "exquisite".

June 2016

As a guest of the Gallery of Readers, Zane Kotker read with her cousin Elizabeth Dirks in the Neilson room at Smith College. Listen here:

http://zanekotker.com/wp-content/uploads/Two-Women-with-Wine-Glasses.mp3

June 2015

Zane has been named a finalist for the Pablo Neruda poetry prize from Nimrod magazine at the University of Tulsa.

Zane has been invited to book groups that have read The Inner Sea to talk about the book and answer questions. If you are interested in having her visit, please contact her.

December 2014

The Inner Sea is now available as an ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Plus and iTunes.

October 2014

Zane Kotker presents her new novel The Inner Sea: A Novel of the Year 100 October 15, 7 pm
Broadside Bookshop
247 Main Street
Northampton, MA

www.broadsidebookshop.com


September 2014

Zane was interviewed about The Inner Sea recently on New England Public Radio. Listen to the full interview:

http://zanekotker.com/wp-content/uploads/Inner-Sea.m4a

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Part of the audience at the A.P.E. reading.

The Inner Sea: A Novel of the Year 100fresh from Levellers Press, an up-and-coming publisher in what The New York Times calls the heart of book-friendly Massachusetts.

July 2014

Bodies in Motion came out as an e-book. Take a look back to the late 1960‘s and ‘70s. See how your mothers and fathers dealt with child care and parenting before helicoptering developed. Click here.

December 2014

Listen here for Zane Kotker’s interview with Daisy Mathias on Poetry A’ La Carte..

http://zanekotker.com/wp-content/uploads/Driving-the-Bay-Road.m4a


Copyright @ Zane Kotker 2016