Tara-Michelle Ziniuk

ISBN 978-1-77126-137-1
$17.00 CDN/USA
88 pages




“What if love existed but you didn’t have your notification settings turned on?” This is the first question Tara-Michelle Ziniuk asks in Whatever, Iceberg. The answer is a raucous portrait of love gone wrong (and sometimes right) in the Internet age. These are poems that capture the nervous intensity of longing and heartbreak as they explore how to be in a world where gender is ambiguous—as a lover, parent, activist and writer. Ziniuk knows that love and sex get messy and mixed up and she is fearless and funny in documenting the tumult of expectation and loss. Readers will find here a poet whose truth-telling bravely faces up to the most intimate details.

“This collection is like a weary and brazen novel about lost love, snapped into irreducible pieces. Everything is broken, everything falls apart, so here is a collection of poems to teach us how to celebrate that, how to document it, how to fashion something better—still flawed, though, still failing—out of its ruins. It’s a wise book about having dumb bad luck in love. These are messy, contradictory, polarized, tenacious poems. I ate them up. You too will marvel at how nimbly Tara-Michelle Ziniuk sticks a needle into the balloon of preciousness.”

—Michael V. Smith, author of My Body Is Yours: A Memoir

“To see that iceberg for who he really is, you have to get some distance. You have to submerge yourself in frigid water and open your eyes to the salt sting. Out of the long pause after the brightness hits, Ziniuk’s poems blast back at that remoteness, that icy slick.”

—Sarah Dowling, author of Down

“It’s touching and expertly written and really fucking funny, this collection of queer breakup and absence and shittiness and love. Guttural and measured in its mess, these poems build on each other and fuse alight. This is an amazing book.”

—Casey Plett, author of A Safe Girl To Love

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