You and Other Pieces

“If there was any remaining doubt that prose is the new poetry, or that prose-poetry is the new sublime, along comes Corey Zeller’s intimate, winningly melancholiac collection You and Other Pieces, which will wring your heart out, over and over and over. Allow this book to treat you to all the secrets about yourself that you would never otherwise come to know.”

–Gary Lutz, author of Divorcer

Do not be fooled by the claim that this book of fiction is making, namely that this book is not a book of poetry. If I know anything about such matters of naming, what I know is this: that You and Other Pieces is a book of poems disguised as a book of fiction. Corey Zeller is a tree in wolf’s clothing, in other words, or a leaf that used to be a stone. This is the real fiction being proposed here by this book and the bigger truth behind such ambiguity of name-calling is what makes Corey Zeller the writer that he is, making a name for himself in those literary circles where seeing and saying makes a world of what it is and what it is not.

- Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish

Zeller not only builds worlds but, exploring the cracks between language and reality, deftly makes them strange, absurd, surreal. You and Other Pieces offers that perfect alternation of soberness and absurdity that allows these pieces to worm their way into your head, demand your attention then keep on wriggling long after the book is closed.”

- Brian Evenson, author of Windeye

With an acute eye for specifics, Corey Zeller unravels rupturing narratives, narratives that refuse to follow time, insisting instead on exploring every possible sideline of memory, association, and escape, narratives that explode into sheer momentum, dissolve into poetic suspensions, and pursue the limits of a linguistic precision - relentlessly and gorgeously. ‘I want to yell a pearly thing,’ he says. And he does.”

- Cole Swensen, author of Gravesend