Tag: shelli rottschafer

INTERVIEW: MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

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Maya Jewell Zeller’s most recent publication is Raised by Ferns, a memoir-in-essays released by Porphyry Press (March 2026.)  Raised by Ferns details how Maya became a creative, a writer, and an advocate for the wild.  She now lives in Ellensburg and Spokane, Washington with her children.  She teaches English at Central Washington University, and is Faculty of Poetry and Nature Writing within the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado.  She can be found wandering huckleberry lined trails, gazing up toward towering ponderosa pine trees, and sniffing roses in city botanical gardens. https://mayajewellzeller.com  

Poet, author, and frequent reviewer for the South Broadway Press journal, Shelli Rottschafer, recently sat down to interview Maya.

SLR: Dear Maya, thank you for this interview.  

I am excited to learn from you about where life has led you and how your path has influenced your writing.  

It seems to be clear you have a keen sense of play, especially in how you teach.  I have seen this in your collaborative academic text written with Kathryn Nuernberger.  At the end of each chapter you both encourage students to experiment, you give “invitations to reflect,” and even provide writing prompts on “remixing nursery rhymes.” 

Can you talk about the importance of play in writing?

MJZ: Thank you for underscoring that, Shelli! I am a huge fan of the pedagogy of play. When I taught high school, I used to introduce Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” by reading aloud the children’s book Henry Climbs a Mountain, by D.B. Johnson; and in my in-person poetry classes at the college level, we often begin study of duende with a campus scavenger hunt (spanning art and science buildings and programs). In both cases, play opens up the brain and body to experiment and adventure—two of the aspects of a healthy curiosity that allows learning and growth. In writing—as we know—playing games and making our own rules can sometimes lead to new discoveries. If we approach ‘received forms’ as play—as in a nursery rhyme remix—we can also discover.

SLR: In that co-edited text – Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. NY: Bloomsbury, 2024 you have a chapter on the “Poetics of Spells.”  You use that practice in your poetry collection, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (2017).  Throughout it you create incantations, you invoke chants, and you weave in textures almost making your words touchable.  

How are repetition and sensory details additives in verse?

MJZ:  I love it when poets interview poets, spellmakers convene with spellmakers! I know that you also practice repetition and sensory details in your work, so you know: spells are poems and poems are spells; they are small powerful incantations, whether we call them charms or not. Poems make something happen, through repetition and invocation—saying something over and over can feel like summoning or conjuring, and the sensory world translated into verse can make us FEEL it viscerally, as if we are experiencing it. A spell-poem is a translation of desire for, or protection from, the tangible world and its beings. 

SLR: Your 2023 collection, Out Takes / Glove Box, which was the winner of the New American Poetry Prize, teaches a unique form of poetry–the Out Take Poem.  

Can you explain this inventive form?  How do you select your “golden lines”?

MJZ:    Yes. Merriam-Webster defines out take as “something that is taken out: such as a : a take that is not used in an edited version of a film or videotape, or b :  a recorded musical selection not included in a record album.” In a craft talk I give on this concept, I define out take three ways, the first of which is:  “the images, narrative, or other materials behind the poem or the final image; those materials which did not make the printed version, and which may be less formal/ polished/ directly narrative/ contributing to a clear and direct discourse, but which may access a layer of the psyche or subconscious hinted at but not explored in the original image” (Jewell Zeller, “Out Takes From the Making: The Story Behind the Image”). Put simply, a poetic out take is simply taking unexplained or mysterious allusions/ images from a parent-poem, and then unfolding what’s behind them—kind of like giving those images an origin story. My “out takes” were invented when I took a poem I’d written, called “Documentary,” and then pulled images to make seven other poems, the “Out Takes From the Making” of the documentary—like cuts from the final film. That series was first published in Juked in 2017, but folks could also pick up the (2023) book and see how the images scatter through other poems. Thanks for asking about it!

SLR:  Both Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (2017) and The Wonder of Mushrooms: The Mysterious World of Fungi (2025)—which is a Foreword Indies 2025 Finalist in the Nature Category, are beautifully illustrated. Alchemy pairs each of your poems with visual artist Carrie DeBacker’s nature-based paintings. The Wonder juxtaposes illustrator Jenny deFouw Geuder’s woodland scenes with your descriptive prose.

How does ekphrasis tell a herstory rooted in m(other) nature?

MJZ:    I love that you’re picking up so directly on intersectional feminist undertones, Shelli. So for Alchemy, it was a true collaboration—we sent poems and images back and forth and composed in response to one another’s work. The ekphrastic responses were true makings based from another woman’s work, as well as Lorca’s “deep spirit of the earth” coming up through each other’s art. Then our publisher arranged them for the final draft of the book. 

In The Wonder of Mushrooms, it was less ekphrastic and more of an illustration. Jenny and I were both contracted for the book by AdventureKEEN, who also worked with me to set an outline of topics/ phenomena they wanted covered. While Jenny did wait to get the final copy of the word file from me before painting, it was more about illustrating content than making something up in response. So, it was probably more rooted in the earth than in our creating from it—a kind of mycelial response. 

SLR: Throughout Raised by Ferns your poetic-lines come through the prose.  An example of this is your essay, “Sestina for Foragers” which is a fusion of the haibun with the sestina.

There are other examples of this inventiveness within your writing as well. 

Raised By Ferns, Mayz Jewell Zeller’s new memoir

Why experiment with different forms?

MJZ:  That’s so brilliant. I hadn’t thought of “Sestina for Foragers” as a haibun, but I love that you are making that connection—and of course it is there!— the essay is about place and journey as much as it is about mystery and repetition. I have another essay, that precedes the ones I wrote for this memoir, called “Lower Columbia Watershed Haibun: Field Notes on Going Home Again,” first published in Passages North, that I am sure was a predecessor to “Sestina,” and which didn’t make it into Ferns. So to answer your question, I love it when a received form gives us permission to play in another genre: it’s like a fun puzzle, trying to see what fits and where and how—except that in addition to the already structured edges of the puzzle pieces, you can invent shapes while putting the others together. So there’s a bit of magic in that process. Making a poetic sestina, which repeats six words in a predetermined pattern in six sestets and a final tercet, into six sections and a prose envoi, is like creating that final picture—but with some surprise deviation from the predetermined pattern: like following a map to treasure but remaking the map in the process. It’s another way to discover, to play.

SLR: In the essay “The Privilege Button” in Raised by Ferns, you quote Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. You both call to break with traditions, and in your narrative you use creative leaps to say what is often left unsaid, that liminal space between the lines. 

Could you share with us why this resonates with you?

MJZ:  Lorca wrote that “In order to live, a metaphor needs two elements: a form, and a radius of action. A central nucleus and the perspective surrounding it. The nucleus opens like the flower that startles us by its strangeness; but within the radius of light we learn the name of the flower, and we get to know its perfume.” In my Advanced Poetry textbook chapter on duende, I wrote: “I think of Lorca’s form as the image or figurative language that carries the concept, and the radius of action as how the metaphor moves in the poem. The startling occurs when we are transformed or transferred through the process so that we are able to experience it synaesthetically and feel its embodiment viscerally—a relationship with image that transports us, as if by magic, what we first felt in art and then spent the rest of our lives attempting to find again and recreate” (Nuernberger and Zeller, Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology). In deep image poetics, this arrives as the mysterious image, such as those in Out Takes. In Ferns, there is an echo of this with the rhizomes brought up throughout the book, and coalescing in the various forms, and later footnotes of the title essay. The leaping of Lorca resonates so deeply with me because I am also made of “thistle and terminal stones” like he references in “Theory and Play of the Duende.” 

SLR: Your memoir is a heavy self-gaze.  It’s a chronicling from creative youth to creative adult, a herstory of resilience.

In hindsight, what would you tell young Maya now?

MJZ:   I think I’d tell her she’s going to face a choice in young adulthood, and she’ll think that one path is the way to stability, to security, but that instead, she could be her own anchor. That she is the stabilizing factor she seeks. I’d tell her to choose herself….  [and that] art isn’t a wildness you have to prune or garden in secret between the things other people need; it’s the wildness you should cultivate by going into it. 

SLR: You have relationships with young creatives because you are a mother and an educator.  

In our hard times as we face challenges with international conflict, climate change, and juggling to have and to have not,

what could you advise your audience? 

MJZ:   Shelli, thank you for this beautiful set of scaffolded questions that pay such deep attention to my lineage and canon of work, in our world that pulls us in so many directions. I think my last answer (above), about art and wildness is part of the advice I’d give, but I also think there’s something in advice that is particular to each individual, and to the worlds they inhabit and in which they might create and act to protect others. 

So this is [what I would say in] general: make something that gives you joy, and that probably, in that discovery, will also offer joy to others. Make it out of scraps if you can, but don’t think you only deserve cast-off scraps. 

And of course try not to use up everything: leave some huckleberries for the bears, and leave some for the next people who come to pick. And remember that you don’t own the land you’re walking on, and that if you do take something, you better give something back. If you feel yourself being erased by someone else, don’t imagine they will color you back in later, or that you don’t deserve to be all the shades of yourself that you are. 

SLR: Maya, thank you for reminding us that we all need to make space for others, that we need to pay attention to ourselves, and that all children and animals and plants are sacred. Thank you for gathering upon the page with us here at South Broadway Press.

READ: SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER’S REVIEW OF MAYA JEWELL ZELLER’S RAISED BY FERNS

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Raised By Ferns by Maya Jewell Zeller

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BOOK REVIEW:
RAISED BY FERNS
BY MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Raised by Ferns begins with an epigraph by Diane Seuss:

I am so hungry

for the song that grows tall like a weed

grows, and grows.

Zeller yearns for her words to grow, and they do.  They dig roots down to briny delta water.  They spindle outward like invasive but naturalized blackberries that are common in the Pacific Northwest.

Maya’s story begins in the myths she has been told, in the wondering of, “What’s Real, What’s True, What’s Worth Retelling” (20).  She was born into the hands of midwives.  She was cradled in Mayan-wool blankets her German-born father imported from Guatemala to the US.  Her rural childhood taught her the necessity to forage, accept the ghosts of worn down farmhouses like additional family members.  She and her family lived itinerantly, a mobile and hybrid lifeway able to call various shelters home.

Zeller’s ability to find home in a variety of ways also informs her writing.  Her prose is fed by her poetry.  Her poetry is nourished in nature.  Her human nature is scribed in stanza, strophes, and verse-filled metaphors.  Her stories are a herstory; a seed that begats its next iteration:

The Himalayan blackberry came to the United States from Eurasia

in 1885, and it spread into the hills….

Cancer spreads not like a military but like a blackberry….

Cancer isn’t militant so much as fruitful – it produces globules of black gold.

The globules of berries are not unlike the beads of sand on my fingers while I eat berries on the beach near where I was born (21-22).

And so, Zeller’s prose is born through her ecopoetics.

Maya recalls her parents as “free spirits” and she and her siblings as semi-feral, but there is more than meets first glance (25).  A father with addiction, a boy-home escapee, a mother stepping out of a Midwest confined in Catholicism; both were determined to do things differently than their previous generation.  Perhaps, this desire to do things differently has rubbed off on Zeller as well.  She vacillates between what Wallace Stevens states as “of two minds” (8).  To have, and to have not.  To choose a lifeway, or to choose another life.  To gain education painstakingly, or to pretend one has always had privilege and access.  As an adult, Maya now knows both painfully well.

Zeller states, “I learned early the advantage of keeping my opinions to myself, and then later to be heard I’d have to yell them…. I learned to search for patterns and shape them to my advantage (27).  Maya’s navigation gives her strategy in her writing, what she reveals and what she weaves.  This she learned through books, the public library often was her teacher.  Libraries gave access to things, worlds, and concepts that otherwise would not have been available.  For young Maya the library was what, “some kids in cities might anticipate the ice cream truck… new flavors.  I could almost taste the books” (28).  Books and the stories they held were her cherry-on-top.

In her writing, Zeller is, “not interested in another pastoral that shows you the honey but not the sting” (33).  She wants the real, “the pus and entrails,” the busted stitches to the finished quilt (33).  Like the squares that are darned together to make a whole, each essay is part of the patchwork that makes her memoir.

Folks often ask Zeller, “how [she] got from there to here” (40); it’s not a vertical trajectory. It’s muscle memory, like water in a flood plain, it remembers.  A fibrous rhizome that spores out in order to survive.  Maya has gotten where she is through hard work, elder knowledge passed onward, and personal tenacity.  What engages her is to find wonder.  Curiosity in the wild, in glancing through fern leaves, in observing her own children – this is what feeds her well.

Author Maya Jewell Zeller

As her reader moves through her various essays, Zeller peals back her pain.  The discovery that her life partner is having an affair, the nudging on her psychosis that the friend is more than a friend.  Her world is up-ended, but she has, “had a lot of practice in overcoming shit” (226).  Yet, the full reveal takes time.  There is more to it all and she asks of herself, “What does the body know that we don’t? (229).  

As a child, she learned to lean on herself and the world she created through storytelling.  As an adult, she, “learned, by unlearning to love… that her mind and blood and babies” half belonged to him (230).  How could she reclaim her stardust, her hours, her life?  She could do so by writing her own herstory.  That is what Raised by Ferns is, a telling, a gathering of all the things she has thus far learned.

In her Epilogue Zeller wonders what is both “Real and Not Real” (231).  What are the myths she has been told, what are the stories she has created, and what is the legacy she hopes to carry forward for herself, her children, and her reader?  

There are times of epiphany, when once something brought pleasure, she realizes a thing she normally loved needs to be left behind.  These are the tough but necessary goodbyes.  Maya explains, “I couldn’t help but note some proximal off-ness,” a layer that must be shed (231).  She knows, “the body holds each fact” and needs to flush itself of dead skin, even one that has been intertwined with her own.

This is the moment, she asks her ex-partner to be honest with her when he is unwilling to be.  To be direct with what he wants when he is only capable of directly being hurtful. It takes more than two and a half years, but Zeller learns to make amends with herself knowing that – most importantly – she needs to be honest and direct with herself rather than accept, “the Numb” (235).  Maya lays it plain, “I’m navigating something psychologically unmooring – something complex and monstrous and technical and ineffable” (239-240).  An unraveling of the stability she was determined to create as a reaction to the “free spirit” and unsteady ground of her own childhood.

Zeller realizes it is difficult and a false equivalency.  She questions, “How can I help my children trust themselves, develop ways to cope and self-regulate in a world that isn’t getting better?” (241).  

Her answer is that she still has hope in a world with snow falls, an ocean replete with sea stars, and summer-time blackberries that stain lips with sweet.

READ: AN INTERVIEW WITH MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

RAISED BY FERNS

BY MAYA JEWELL ZELLER

AVAILABLE THROUGH PORPHYRY

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: SOFAR by Elizabeth Bradfield

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BOOK REVIEW:
SOFAR BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Sofar is Bradfield’s fifth collection of poetry and it demonstrates how her craft has come so far.  In it she intertwines her love of nature, her understanding of ecology, and how the waves off Alaskan shorelines as well as her Cape Cod home have shaped her.  The sea floor, its swells and dimples, peaks and trenches are, “proof/ that what’s hidden can still be sensed” (3).

She comments on her life, how her emotions list like a boat, swaying from one side to the other. Tipping, “At/ the edge of what felt right.  And now, / here we are” – she learns to float, to lean into herself and her being, to selvage after a storm (5).  To pick up the pieces that have been discarded like flotsam.

Bradfield notices seasonal changes and “the change” of her body.  Both are unexpected (6).  She compares this strangeness with the surging emotions of her adolescent self as compared to the retreat that she now is experiencing upon reaching five decades.  Her poems give testimony to her coming out and her understanding as a queer woman in a misogynistic world.  Each tide are transformative and, “as capable / of damage as any / ungiving thing” (6).

In “Marlinspike” she observes herself and the many lives she has had, as boat hand, as naturalist, as poet – “despite the fact [that she] was a girl” (27).  Bradfield is compelled to go forward to keep moving, to follow her bait line so she, “can drift at last / from what holds us tight, what / binds us to such boring normalcy” (27).  And clearly in stating this her life’s path is everything BUT a complacent normal.

SOFAR Author Elizabeth Bradfield

Rather she embraces her voyageur-self.  “Vagus means wandering.  My days vaguer / and vaguer.  Was it yesterday or last year…. Where did time go?” (46). Bradfield recognizes she is buoyed, lifted up and jettisoned. An estrogen-related propulsion, a uteral roam within a world she wishes to explore.  

Her sights are added by, “Ded Reckoning” (48).

To know where you are and when

you’ll get where you’re going,

to deduce via reckoning, look to landmarks…

The known….

Which hold unknowns.

And through these renderings Bradfield has come to, “know / roughly where [she is]” (48) proving that life lessons are a constant moving equation.

In “Held/Treasured/Secret” Bradfield carries fragility within her.  She knows life is fragile like a paper nautilus.  She cups it in her hand, fingers curl shell-like.  By doing this, she understands that what she holds dear is a responsibility.  Picking it up, carrying it this far, requires a vigilance.  Yet decerning when it must be set down is the ultimate lesson of letting go.Elizabeth Bradfield furthers these lessons as an educator.  She teaches at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and is the Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Gunnison.  Her work is heavily lauded.  Interpretive Work won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry.  Approaching Ice was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award.  Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry was a winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award.  She also is the Editor-in-Chief of Broadsided in which Ekphrastic Poetry is in conversation with artwork.

SOFAR

BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

AVAILABLE THROUGH PERSEA

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: What the River May Bring by Erin Robertson

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BOOK REVIEW:
WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA BY ERIN ROBERTSON

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Robertson gathers her words to advocate for the land and the confluence of both the Koyukuk and Yukon Rivers.  During her time in the Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge she was embedded with biologists, collaborating with her craft through the Artist-In-Residence program “Voices of the Wilderness”.

Her poetry draws us in, witnesses to her experiences upon this land, and helps us envision her impressions of interior Alaska.  It all begins, “when the float plane’s buzz fades” as she first settles into her sub-arctic residency.  She meets the, “devoted swans, tender loons, [and] dancing cranes.”  She follows moose tracks and moss lined trails.  These relationships with the other-than-human creatures she encounters bring her company.

Glaciers, and clouds, and wild country greet her.  Upon arrival in the Alaska Interior she leaves behind “creature comforts” and chooses a new freedom; trading suburbia, her partner and children, for a growing winter white and jagged mountains.  It’s a new opening, a new era of possibility for her.  “Wilderness Eve” seems to recollect a childlike wonder, a new version of awaiting gifts below a Christmas Tree:

waiting to see

what this wilderness holds

sleepless and sleepy

dreaming the space

and the silence (21).

Her time in Alaska and her observations while there is an unveiling where she comes to realize: 

I knew I hit the lottery

but hadn’t quite known

how many riches there’d be (25).

Robertson marvels at nature’s natural wonders.  For her, the Yukon River inspires just like Georgia O’Keefe’s infamous cloud-scapes or French Impressionists’ swirling lines.  The river:  

It bends and dapples and distorts…

Adding and subtracting shades (27).

Still, “You never know what / the river may bring… Everything comes down the river / if you watch long enough” (29).  And yet, like the old adage, one can never step in the same river twice, its purge and rejuvenation brings new waters that can both cleanse and drown.

Author Erin Robertson

In her poetic meanderings, Robertson also takes on the persona of “Other Animals” like otter, caribou, peregrines, and Swainson’s Thrush.  She watches their lives, their passage onto new territory, and their passing into the beyond.  It’s a moment, a flicker, a stillness juxtaposed to the more rapid pace of her life back “home” in Colorado.

Fire, too is a constant, not only in the Alaskan Interior but throughout the Mountain West like Robertson’s home upon the Front Range.  She notes:

after the fire

naked birches are

black and white tapers

all blown out (56).

Even after a “Severe Burn” she comments on the stark beauty:

The burn dazzles

despite a blackened past (57).

Seemingly, it is a reality that we all have to come to accept because out of destruction, the ashes can reinvent a newness, a regrowth, another possibility.

Robertson’s experience as an Artist-In-Residence is a testament to her “Vocation” (105).  She embraces where this has taken her:

so many options open

when you go where you’re called

when you do what you love

when you toss every last bitter pill aside…

the earth is humming

with so many ways to play

what will you try next? (105).

This is the challenge that she sets before us.  In her closing poem, “Accounting for Awe” she sets us straight, like one hiking boot in front of the other and asks:

What is the sum of these days of devotion?

An accounting of the endless ways to direct awe.

Anywhere you look there’s a one-inch bit of wonder…

To not let it all burn yet (107).

Here is our reason, in our act of love for nature, we will find compassion for ourselves.

Boulder County Poet Erin Robertson carries this love for nature and compassion forward. She is the founder of BoCo Wild Writers where she teaches outdoor nature writing classes.  Her work can be found at http://www.erinrobertson.org

WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA

BY ERIN ROBERTSON

AVAILABLE THROUGH RAW EARTH INK

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: In the Soup by John Calderazzo

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BOOK REVIEW:
IN THE SOUP BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Calderazzo is an accomplished Nature Writer and emeritus professor within the English Department at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.  In The Soup is his latest poetry collection.  Expressed in three sections Calderazzo relays how he feels, in the soup, in the thick of life-after-retirement on the “Big Day,” as he is “Gathering Voltage,” and one “Windy Day at the Dump.”

Calderazzo begins with his titular poem, “In the Soup” – a psychedelic homage to his inner-man found at the bottom of a can of turkey noodle soup.  Calderazzo ponders the ingredients. What makes a man, what makes the contents of life, what inspires our mindfulness?  The ensuing pages hope to reveal these answers.

PART I: BIG DAY

“Second Coming” wonders about our connection to fading stars and skies laden with floating feathers that cascade like snowfall (13).  Calderazzo takes up his lament for extinct and endangered species.  The Passenger pigeon, “that once blocked the sun” now, “bearing down on oblivion” (13).  Will their eradication be the future for howling wolves and roaring grizzlies?  The same goes for unshackled rivers, and sludge gray oceans.  What will their fate be as climate change deepens?  Some may deny these cause-and-consequence actions but, “even the wind-bitten crew of / the farthest-out whale boat… began to comprehend / what we had done” (14).  

In “The Secret Life of Mountains: Front Range of the Rockies,” Calderazzo explicates his home-place in a meditation of tercets:

Deep in,
a lupine meadow
scored with trails

softens, mists over,
dousing spot-fires
of glacier lilies (33).

It is Spring. The Front Range is emerging into new life.  The:

Pasque flowers
close their petals
like eyelids folding (33)

into meditation,
relieved from 
the trespass (34)

This is Calderazzo’s means of telling his reader to “Go lite” and “Think Like a Mountain” as Aldo Leopold implores.  Yet to also take on John Muir’s challenge, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” but do so with care in order to preserve their beauty, and to protect them from “boot scrape” and drone’s “beauty-lust” (34).

PART II: GATHERING VOLTAGE

“Way Stones” told in three numbered stanzas stories acts of subtle environmental activism.  Beginning with his friend who knocks over cairns – the way stones marking paths on trails.  His friend, who shakes his head in disgust and kicks the keystones which topple in disarray, demonstrating that he prefers, like Robert Frost, to take the road less travelled by.  However, Calderazzo actually doesn’t mind them.  The stone pyres, “suggest a tall dance / with gravity” marking where, “The trail / goes this way… [and] Death is that way” (43).  Calderazzo notes that in other lands, cairns value prayer, offer blessing, and lead the way, “A last ride / through the stars,” which is entirely a different matter.

Author John Calderazzo

PART III: WINDY DAY AT THE DUMP

“Windy Day at the Dump” is a necro-pastoral poem which details environmental decline’s  connection to humanity by listing the things discarded within a landfill.  The poem documents Calderazzo’s personal letting-go of things and moments in his life that now decay within the dump’s depths.  Medical records of a last parent to die, the draft of a youthful novel too embarrassing to recycle, love letters, a broken wall clock, a fizzling floor lamp.  These objects mark his passing of time and are his mile markers of maturation.  They are the cairns that lead the way to his end flight (68-69).

Calderazzo’s closing poem of his collection, “Passing through” is his quest through Wingo, Kentucky in search of his final resting place.  However, “The casket shop has moved” and so he decides to, “pass on a casket, thank you.”  Instead he chooses for his final destination to be a “high flower valley” surrounded by “peaks of snowlit fire.”  He prefers for his ashes to “zephyr off while friends & family / lift their arms & sing” (87).  And in this way those who would remember him, mimic his chosen poetic lineage as they burst into a Whitman-like mighty yawp.

Calderazzo’s collection, In The Soup (2025) by Middle Creek Publishing & Audio nods to his literary community and those who came before him.  Through this gathering, he enters their company, and encourages others to tell their stories, communicate to the public about the importance of wilderness preservation, and find those ancient cairns while trekking among high mountains around the world.

IN THE SOUP

BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

AVAILABLE NOW!

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Leaf Manifesto by Laurel Radzieski

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

WILD NATURE, WILD WOMEN, A WILD ECOPOETICS:
LAUREL RADZIESKI’S LEAF MANIFESTO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Laurel Radzieski welds her pen to manifest an embodied poetics and advocacy for the wild.  Wild nature. Wild Women.  This collection is unique because she plays upon the page physically and artistically in form, as many of these poems take shape within female curves. The growth from within is her child, and in this way the verse thrives.

The collection follows a flora lifecycle.  Each section reminds the reader of this beginning to end:  Seed, Germination, Sprout, Seedling, Sapling, Tree, Flowering, and ultimately the tempestuous Fruit.  Radzieski sets out upon her poetics journey stating, “One day I said aloud / I might like to be a tree” (11) and so she entices her reader to figure out what this may mean.

Throughout Leaf Manifesto Radzieski prompts us with questions: “What is a woman?” (15). And provides multiple choice answers, that only lead to more internalized questions.  Through this feminist lens she taunts her reader to poke at their own preconceived perceptions.  “Who gets to be a woman?” (16).  “What use is a woman?” (17).  “What’s it like to be a woman?” (21).  Once again, she tests her reader through a True / False dichotomy.  She dares us to shade in our answer fully with a #2 Lead Pencil.

In “How to Identify as a Tree” (38), Radzieski considers identity, origin, and belonging.  “Consider what others would want to know about your bark patterns and inner rings.”  Yet how a tree-body-person may appear doesn’t describe the within.  Rather, “roots and family tree” nudge toward fuller truths.  Especially as it oft happens, “If you are on unseeded land, know the history of the ground, how it got that way.”  In this way, Radzieski alludes to those who came before us.  She acknowledges that the land of her manifesto is of indigenous origins and birthright.

Author Laurel Radzieski

Throughout her collection, Radzieski offers up Ven Diagrams.  In “Woman Tree” (69), she encloses what these two entities have in common: branches, limbs, mistakes, leaves, organs, roots, flesh, rings, family, pain, and flowers.”  At least with this last word, she ends on hope.

Radzieski’s final poem in the collection, “Past Life Regression” (121) is a haiku:

Fallen walnut.  Such
a long way down, but then
soft idea of grass.

This seasonal form representing a walnut tree’s lifespan, culminates in a fruit-nut’s finality.  Not eaten, but allowed to cascade to an end-place.  Tranquility lands in grass.  Her bed, which begins again the tree’s lifecycle as the seed buries into soil knowing she will sprout once more. 

Laurel Radzieski won the Halycon Award from Middle Creek Publishing & Audio for this collection.  It is her second full collection of poetry.  Other poems have found a home in Rust + Moth, The New Your Quarterly, and Atlas.  She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania and is the Director of Grants at Alvernia University.

LEAF MANIFESTO

BY LAUREL RADZIESKI

AVAILABLE NOW!

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com