Aleksander Zywicki's ZOUNDS!, chosen by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize, is a meditative exploration of a lifelong relationship with God, religion, and devotion. "Zounds" is a contraction combining "God's" and "wounds," an early modern exclamation that often edges towards blasphemy, and a literal evocation of Christ's crucifixion wounds. In these poems of family, love, and longing, ZOUNDS! deftly captures the experience of sonic and existential rupture, the wounds sustained in an enduring struggle with faith.

Aleksander Zywicki was raised in Bayonne, New Jersey. He holds an MFA from The New School and his work appears in: Plume, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, Seneca Review, Shō Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Aleks has received a poetry fellowship from the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and a teaching fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He teaches English and creative writing at The Hudson School.

"What a thrill it has been to come upon this book. Aleksander Zywicki's sensibility—his off-kilter rhythms, his surprising collisions of image and sound, the many ways these poems snap closed at their ends—is brilliant and utterly original. In ZOUNDS! Zywicki meditates on the vagaries of memory and the divine, the certainties of mortality, and the complexities of living among other complex, often unreachable people. Always at work in these poems is a keen, scalpel-like intelligence slicing away in search of something like truth. And always present, too, is that musician's sense of song that lives inside language. This is a formidable debut." — Kevin Prufer, Judge of the 2024 Barrow Street Press Book Prize and author of The Fears

"In a voice as steady and incantatory as prayer, the spare, penetrating poems of AleksZywicki's ZOUNDS! unfold down their pages. These are meditations on a complicated grief,and the casual cruelties and disappointments of being human—those that find us, andthose we make of ourselves. But even as the voice edges toward the stoic, it softens with awarm reverence for life's modest joys, and the strange wonder that is our life on earth.Turning from one object of devotion to the next—family, god, love, labor, the naturalworld—these poems tunnel to the heart of faith's lonely edifice, searching, earnestly, forsomething worth believing in." — Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses

"Aleksander Zywicki's arresting debut sweeps like a lighthouse beam across the jagged surfaces of alife. The tumbling, mostly unpunctuated lines of ZOUNDS! evoke the slipperiness of memory whilestill feeling tethered to a stark present: 'suddenly it is the hour / when god is peeled from yourtongue.' While death, family dysfunction, and lapsed faith are foundational to much of thiscollection ('chaos gathers each night / into the ghost of my father'), they are countered by a senseof hope as the poet builds a future with his wife and young daughter. These restless, bracinglyintelligent poems seem to recognize that it is not necessarily their job to make sense of the world, yetin mysterious and unexpected ways, they do." — Mark Bibbins, author of 13th Balloon