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Praise for It’s the Unremarkable that will Last

What do you do when you realize “there was/more than love in the world” or when you learn “our stories are just/country songs unsung”? Take my advice and immerse yourself in the mix of silence and trees, crows and memories inside Jim Zola’s book of poetry. “Find/a way to live among the small things/with bones like air and hearts like small sledgehammers.” There is grace and comfort in the unremarkable and as he reminds us while memory can be fleeting and silence may have been invented by the hearing, he’s the “one who keeps adding the stars”. Illuminating, indeed, It’s the Unremarkable That Will Last.

—Sherry O’Keefe, author of Cracking Geodes Open and Making Good Use of August.

Jim Zola’s poems alarm us all the right ways, they wake us to the particular peculiarities of the moment. There is bittersweet memories mixed in with myth and personal iconography. I know not a more capable poet who strives to delight us and make us want to sing. It’s the Unremarkable That Will Last is in fact remarkable and necessary reading

—Virgal Suarez, author of The Painted Bunting’s Last Molt and Amerikan Chernobyl.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Zola is a poet and photographer living in Greensboro, North Carolina. He grew up in Niskayuna, New York. He has worked as a librarian at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and a children’s librarian at a public library. Previous books published include What Glorious Possibilities (2014 Aldrich Press), Monday After the End of the World (2020 Kelsay Books), and Erasing Cabeza de Vaca (2020 Main Street Rag).