Whiting and Hopwood Award winner, Martha Zweig’s fifth book, considers life through highly original metaphors of the natural world, which are really no metaphor at all, but like one of her muses William Blake, become the extraordinary of the ordinary, where now in her 8th decade, she is assuredly able to tackle things without exactly naming them. A life-long resistance to a more pedantic narrative is why she excels so in poetic form.

Listen, this will make you feel better: it is

death, your very

own death, & though it burns behind your nose like shame

& blisters your frank tears like shame,

you may try it on like a good best dress, like the lace-

on-lavender remember you had to

slither into, wriggle it off you inside-out?— (Against Consolation)

Zweig herself is a study of fascinating contrasts. Adopting a workers-rights identity due to her political beliefs, she had a classical education background, to include Warren Wilson College. While it has been argued that radical activists who adopted blue-collar work can never truly experience what it is like to be born into that, because they possess choice. This argument makes assumptions about the value of solidarity, resistance and fighting a cause. A similar argument has been brought to biological men transitioning to females, suggesting neither can truly experience the inequity of a position, for example, of gender or of class, when choice is involved. This is most famously expounded upon by M2F transitioned economist Deirdre McCloskey*. However, as McCloskey also points out, one’s identification is key. Zweig’s life-long identification with the worker is why her writing exemplifies the workers experience, as well as a depth of understanding class struggle. Additionally, from a Zen perspective, given everything is temporal, why can’t someone else speak to what’s there? Who owns the experience? Are only those born into it able to speak to it? As with death, seeing doesn’t mean we know, it means we’re willing to look, which is the purview of any poet:

One day it quits.

The whole business quits. Imagine that. (The Breakfast Nook)

These poems are at times a maze in their seeming obliqueness, their persistent untangling untidiness; they can appear haphazard, until you contemplate what they’re really telling the reader. This idiosyncratic, often auditory method isn’t madness, nor folly, but resembles very much how the inner brain takes in the natural world and applies it without knowing, to what we understand as ‘self.’ Employing at times an antique diction that returns us to lost epochs of memory, or a time before now, alongside heady enjambments and deliberately detailed, imbedded language, echoing times when words were robust. Zweig takes us down into the hollows, simultaneously wallowing in mud and insight:

Ophelia

murmured among the pansies, & thought

of the gagging pond, mud like snot, & distant

whistles & twitters of minstrels having nothing

better to do than each to embellish & tweak

at another’s song. (Waterskin)

This is a life, Zweig’s life, so far, and as such, the arc is grand and reaching. Zweig manages to touch on elements within her experience as a child, mother and grandmother and then pollenates her seeds widely to consider the entirety of existence, especially the natural one, which she holds a deep reverence for. Often this delight of nature is expressed in colloquial form, the parlances of language that many would gloss over or edit out. By defying the usual bleaching of language to preferred modern norms, Zweig retains her unique socio-linguistic-voice. You read a poem of hers, and you know who wrote it. Instead of learning to fit in, Zweig has deliberately walked outside.

& my job they put me off a distance turning the pockets, picking out

the corners sharp so the stitchers next needn’t have to fuss & miss their rate. (Taint)

Snails of the Apocalypse, as a collection, includes and exceeds snails in its reach and lasting impact; speaking to metaphysical arenas, that are better described indirectly, for their foreboding proximity. There is such disjointed humor throughout, we’re soon convinced Zweig is having fun with this collection, and hardly maudlin at all. One can argue each thing she examines is a momentary muse, adding to the pallet of her life in a clever feverish twist on words:

I’m a yellow-

fever mosquito now & he’s the born-again

bluetick-tattooed bitch in boots, both

of us bloodsuckers these

our latest lives around (Reincarnal)

Without knowing Zweig’s thoughts on appropriation, I would argue her solidarity with the worker was to inhabit honest experience and thus, understand it within limits. Much like being told ‘if you can pass as white, you must acknowledge your privilege.’ If Zweig’s choice of blue-collar influence is a universalist consideration within the literary canon, it is also found through questions within her poetry, expanding into questions of who amongst us will break through the oppressive system:

O dark matter, why

can’t we get it together, punch out the boss clock? (Big Bang).

When referring to choice in this context, we’re referring to her deliberate work in manual labor that exists at an intersection between one’s lived experience through commitment to social ideas. Zweig’s activism and writing cannot be viewed as ‘class tourism,’ because she consciously donated a large portion of her life to campaigning for more equitable workers’ rights. One could argue her being a vessel for this larger enquiry on equity, is her life’s greatest work, which we locate repeatedly in her writing when considering even from the beginning she stood up for others and for herself as a woman:

I get called on in class. My hand

wasn’t up. I memorize. I recite. (All the precedents in order)

Zweig’s authenticity, even with choice, caused her to stand in solidarity with the blue-collar worker and not just stay for a season, she worked in factories for over a decade. That immersion doesn’t jive with exploitative appropriation, but rather, speaks to a commitment to rolling up her sleeves and helping, much in the vein of Jane Goodall and others who dedicate themselves to trying to eradicate suffering. The physical toll and monotonous work Zweig experienced for ten long years, wasn’t briefly tasted, it was her life and as such, it was her lived experience. In addition, she was active in union advocacy. Was she instead, the all-seeing eye? Reporting in? Of things ‘beyond’ herself?

whose multiplicitous eye

complicates least little things. (Beyond Me)

Critics will argue that there is a ‘colonization’ of certain blue-collar workplaces, by educated and thus, privileged, radicals of the time (60’s and 70’s primarily). As people of color have argued that white people speaking for them, is a form of appropriation and patronization. It could be argued coming from any degree of privilege means you are ultimately a tourist to another class. Such individuals have the luxury to choose because they possess an economic safety net and yet often only those with such economic security have the means to join the arts, where; “somebody ought to have ventured, but no one did or does.” (But No). Zweig tackles this by wondering if poetry is instead, a hinterland, where it is less transactional than impressionistic? Where the exchange is a trade of impressions, not stolen goods:

Sun swap, star swap: but We did not

bring anything else we wish to trade today. (Hinterland)

This counters the patriarchal dominant paradigm that society is forced to squint through. To a world that rejects transaction and opens up to authenticity and cooperation. It is not merely a romanticism of poetry when we seek to write of the grim reality of blue-collar workers’ lives. Appropriation implies taking, rather than giving, and I’d argue Zweig’s efforts were to help and support, never to exploit artistically. Her poetry is not romantic, it is alternative, almost auto-writing in style. Zweig describes her own style perfectly as:

Two secrets overheard confiding

themselves into each other’s ear” (Séance).

What choice does any conscious person have, if not to act in some deliberate way and become part of the resistance? This is the crux of resistance-based art of any kind and Zweig went a step further, by literally, not just figuratively, inhabiting the worlds she spoke of. This permits us, as readers, insight into a world we may otherwise never have experienced. Equally, Zweig’s poetry exists independently from her activism, even though it appears impossible to separate them. After all, hasn’t she the right to her own detailing of life as she experiences it?

Daddy’s old bomb cellar, jars, jars,

raisins, mother’s pickled snowflakes,

other yellow squalls of nothing

going gone to waste. (Ice Out)

It is not surprising this poet lives in Vermont, or some equally verdant locale, because her writing crawls with saturated nature, in all its earnest wild forms. As such, Zweig’s language becomes eccentric at times in a Tempest-like sense. Whether employing devices such as a ghazal or villanelle, she’s able to weft through language, the undulation and urging movement of her surroundings.

you, there, bidden intruder,

signatory in & out of my body’s modest

down-to-earthly log, boost

me into the chilly stirrup whose horse, too big

for me to see, too strenuous to hold, bolts off

in a shudder of hide to the high

screes (Fever Blessing)

Mortality isn’t the only theme in Snails of the Apocalypse; continuing the fairy tale tradition Zweig built in her prior work. The motifs act as allusion to interior states, such as memory or themes of being, but with Snails of the Apocalypse, there’s greater attention paid to mortality where Zweig’s linguistic pivoting can rise and fall with allusive imagery, densely furnished punctuation that feels dizzying, then back to the immersive world she’s built, with lines like; “The dead covet my tongue.” (Zombie Jamboree). If Zweig lives another two decades, she may transition from her current consideration of our eventual endings, as she does here, through the macabre and intelligent poking fun of mortality and our proximity to extinction and back.

the cemetery

surnames studding the quarter-acre

lawn refurbish their mossy &

lichenous denotations (Task Force)

Perhaps her hyper-literary leanings enable her to be somewhat avant-garde in her selections, but the center of her writing, with poems published in The National Poetry Review, Poetry, Cleaver and the Boston Review, prove her words still deeply endure and resonate with a wide readership. Not least in their abiding wry humor and melding of corporal with tangential contemplations:

Love, live

with me helplessly and at mercy, (Advance Directive)

*Deirdre McCloskey (Reflections on My Decision to Change Gender) is quoted as saying: “And more importantly a gender changer age 53, as I was in 1995, can’t have had the exact history of a born girl and woman. She cannot have had the good and the bad experiences of girlhood and motherhood and the rest. No science can change her life history.”  McCloskey goes on to defend and advocate for gender equity in transitioning people, which parallels Zweig’s life-long advocacy for workers, specifically garment workers. Whilst both may acknowledge they weren’t born into, their direct experience of (gender or class oppression) and their resulting shift in identity, led to a greater understanding of struggles within those oppressed frameworks, enabling them to campaign on behalf of others.

Martha Zweig’s four full-length poetry collections include Get Lost (Dream Horse Press, 2020), Monkey Lightning (Tupelo Press, 2010), and What Kind (2003) and Vinegar Bone (1999), both from Wesleyan University Press. Zweig’s recognitions include Hopwood Awards, a Whiting Award, Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, and a Warren Wilson MFA. She lives in Vermont where she worked ten years as an advocate for seniors, after ten years handling garments in a pajama factory where she served a term as International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union shop chair.