Where Is Everyone! is an urgent cry of revolutionary spirit, but it's also a cry bedecked with extinction and nearly possessed by wonder. I think of Peewee Herman screaming and flailing out the pet store in flames with snakes in both fists, right into the camera with heroic terror—like, Where Is Everyone! What Ponge and Fabre gave scientific nature writing was their imagination—Zuba does this too, but to meet—to illuminate the possibilities of meeting—nature in crisis. "The revolution of cells is upon us"—these poems not only proclaim and prove this augury, but they help us to feel how the work of one poem is part of an already inconceivable yet immanent collective activity, created by the "autonaut[s] of every species and cosmic order." That she can translate scientific perception into poetic companionship so breathlessly, with such a frank ecstasy and generous humility, gives me the inspiration and loving intensity I need to get with and what and where everyone really is.
—Farnoosh Fathi
Elizabeth Zuba is the author of the poetry collections Where Is Everyone! (Conduit Books & Ephemera), which won the 2024 Minds on Fire Open Book Prize, and Decoherent The Wing'ed (SplitLevel Texts); as well as the chapbook May Double as a Whistle (The Song Cave). She is also a translator, editor, and art writer.
"Which came first: the song or the world? With a nod to Blake's 'Tyger,' questions beget more questions in Where Is Everyone! Part bestiary, part philology, with a table of contents resembling Montaigne's, this 'treatise on death' is vitalized by exclamation. These fresh and dexterous prose poems rouse the spirit on a cellular level, forging a new animal, a kind of protoplasmic poetics that hyphenates the whole of life." — Alan Felsenthal, Publisher
"From transistor radios to potato pollen-grains to the songs of mastodons, these poems traverse scales and species to create a book that is both of the world and for the world. Pulsing here are the most profound questions, including 'Who among us will know the body of the tree?' and how to hold the fact of death. A social, choreographic text that not only understands that 'Dancing is so much better than it used to be when it was just everybody in a circle!' but proves it to be so, folding cosmic scale into intimate gestures that gust, river, and quiver, then turn on a dime to stop and breathe in silence until the reader moves to the next page and language once again begins. 'Sandpaper. Daffodil. Stone.' How lucky we are, every one of us, to be included in Zuba's dance for everyone." — Karla Kelsey, Published poet
"Where Is Everyone! is an urgent cry of revolutionary spirit, but it's also a cry bedecked with extinction and nearly possessed by wonder. I think of Peewee Herman screaming and flailing out the pet store in flames with snakes in both fists, right into the camera with heroic terror—like, Where Is Everyone! What Ponge and Fabre gave scientific nature writing was their imagination—Zuba does this too, but to meet—to illuminate the possibilities of meeting—nature in crisis. 'The revolution of cells is upon us'—these poems not only proclaim and prove this augury, but they help us to feel how the work of one poem is part of an already inconceivable yet immanent collective activity, created by the 'autonaut[s] of every species and cosmic order.' That she can translate scientific perception into poetic companionship so breathlessly, with such a frank ecstasy and generous humility, gives me the inspiration and loving intensity I need to get with and what and where everyone really is." — Farnoosh Fathi, Renowned poet
