abigail zimmer
Abigail Zimmer is the author of girls their tongues (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2016) and two chapbooks through Dancing Girl Press and Tree Light Books. She lives in Chicago where she is the poetry editor for The Lettered Streets Press. Her work has appeared in NightBlock, Jellyfish, The New Megaphone, and alice blue review, among others. She tumblrs and tweets.
Praise for child in a winter house brightening
WINNER OF THE 2016 CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS AWARD FOR BEST POETRY
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2016 BY CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS
While Abigail Zimmer's re-visioning the Ugly Duckling fable takes on immediate, bludgeoning proportions for us in the era of Photoshop and selfies, it's her lyrically deft and fragmented approach that allows us to re-see beauty and purpose: "What disrupts can be anything," and indeed Zimmer probes both shape and form with careful quietude here, leading us towards urgent improbabilities—a burning balloon that drifts to the ground, smoking scraps of color, and "the shape of things as they are."
—Susanna Childress, author of ENTERING THE HOUSE OF AWE
There is always the implication that the ugly duckling will grow up to be beautiful. But who decides what is beautiful—or even what, essentially, we are? Playing with a ubiquitous tale of childhood and it's known ending, Abigail Zimmer gives us a "gunned down bird," a sad child who talks back, a small & pretty violence, an expectation that does not cooperate. The grown-ups resent you for being ugly, and worse—love you for being beautiful. Zimmer's child in a winter house brightening is a gorgeous & necessary re-examination of an age-old tale and pithy, useless advice.
—m. forajter, author of WHITE DEER
Online Publications
Three poems in Nightblock
Two poems in Ghost Ocean
Four poems in alice blue review
Five poems & interview in Fairy Tale Review
interviews
Chicago Review of Books: Meet Chicago's Resident Myth-Maker, Abigail Zimmer