BU Creative Writing

We’re excited to announce that Jordan Zandi’s (poetry 2010) first book of poems is forthcoming by Sarabande books next February!  You can read the title poem here.  Below, Jordan shares a bit about the making of Solarium.

Many poems from Solarium – and, probably more importantly, the process by which I worked on them – took root in the workshops at Boston University, though only pieces might remain recognizable from those earlier drafts.  I was doing a lot of collage-style generation and revision with that work, and some of the final poems came from two, three, even five, separate poems being grafted onto one another.  Others – and here I think of the title poem in particular, which took around two years start to finish – went through dozens of re-drafts, shedding portions that themselves turned into poems, or that proved to be the missing piece to another poem, or that added to what eventually became a 12-page compost-heap.  I love what’s fragmentary, what’s left out, but I also love the intuited shape, the impression that it might be whole; and it’s hard to make those fragments make a whole.

Thanks for these thoughts, Jordan, and congratulations!