Razor ZigZag

Author:  Daniel Bouchard

Publisher: SubPress (2026)

Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag contains the Pleiades and the presidents, history and space. His writing traces the emotive impact of a walk home from the springs of historical discovery, asking not why we were never told things about ourselves throughout history’s recurrent nightmares, rather why do we often fail to seek that knowledge. We are trapped in a culture of our own making, our complicity with the banal and the bloodshed. Learning from Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser, Razor Zigzag adds the aspect of irreverence to the faces of ongoing disaster. In this astounding collection, Bouchard charts a territory of forgotten narratives: from the lost works of early American poets, to the faded memory of the state’s victims, to the publishing ethics of outer space. This is the manifesto of a new community library: a wolf spider in the mailbox; there are bats in drive-in’s projector light; national politics as a slop of self-enrichment and corruption, and the rise of America’s secret police. This poetry lays out a curriculum for self-examination, calling for new notions of heritage, reclaimed from the right-wing, and charted through books, film, and music. The mole on the sidewalk and the June bug at the screen invite you to come along.