Where Is Everyone!

Author: Elizabeth Zuba
Publisher: Conduit Books & Ephemera (2025) 

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 outside the pet store in flames with snakes in both his fists, screaming and flailing 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 immanently 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.