From the winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

'Syd Zolf is one of our most adventurous thinkers of ethnosexual difference in the era of humanity’s long-collapse into the spectacular abyss of capitalist rationalism. Once more, they teach me that to reach tenderness – for self and other – one must be willing to wrestle with the muscle (and gristle) of one’s historical formation. With characteristic mordant humor, plush wit and a remarkable attention to language’s nuances, Syd Zolf wrests the unexpected delight and thrilling eros of transition back into clanging grief, and helps us hear the eerie yet grand resonances between citizenship and embodiment, parenting and sexuality, the vitality of love and the evisceration of death.

This book is an invitation to examine the myths of the body, a provocation to reinvent ours, and a dare to perceive ourselves in unpredictable flux. Ultimately, it is a love letter to the creature with which we keep company, as we merely play our roles within or choose to “sex the received theater” of this one life. Neutrøis documents a truth, which like gender, has been told slant, so we see it as a private inclination and as a collective, dynamic horizon through which we all must navigate. This book is an arresting and utterly propulsive performance of Zolf’s most audacious exploration yet of language as our fleshiest medium.’ – Divya Victor, author of Curb and Kith

‘Syd Zolf’s Neutrøis blurs the line between writer and written, and in the slippages and distortions where the words fail, the poet emerges to become something other: “knotten,” “shapefront,” “A-merkinized (pubic wig).” Written while “transing” in middle age, confronting the state apparatuses of citizenship, Zolf explores a liminal, transsexual identity where the book, and thus the writer, “neutrals itself.” This is the one who witnesses the witnesser witnessing themself, a third thing, “a thirstspinning star” on the forefront of a brilliant idiolect.’ – Julian Talamantez Brolaski

‘In Neutrøis, Syd Zolf offers an unschooling in queer resistance where language shifts across formal registers, blurs embodiment, witnesses the in between, and, always, refuses to settle. These poems are alive, uncompromising, and surprisingly playful: an invitation to find something worth keeping in the ruins.’ – Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Praise for Janey’s Arcadia:

‘Few poets embody stress like Zolf. Pain most poets cannot imagine exposing with such exacting affliction. Janey’s Arcadia recommends we reconsider the weak arguments of “post-identity politics” because this poet sees how we will lie to hide the brutality of our collective suffering for civilization’s advancement. If you read this without waking your emotional intelligence, well, I’m glad I’m not you with that stick so far up your ass. This is the real poetry. I know it is because it changes me.’ – CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE

‘“I’ve been locked up in this room so/ long, mon dieu, whatever desires arise in me are rampaging/ as fierce and monstrous as gigantic starving jungle beasts.” A great hunger, ravenous as Canada, and filled with rage and hurt, animates Zolf’s splendid new book. On one hand Janey’s Arcadia brings us a few hundred years of western colonization, and on the other, these poems speak to everyone who’s living on someone else’s land or those forced to speak in someone else’s tongue. Whether it’s Cree or English, French or Cobol, there’s always a man and a machine happy to misprise you. “C’est bien. By every fair means. In Manitoba. ...”’ – Kevin Killian

‘Zolf seeks to rip away the pastoral, family-values facade and reveal the real (and continuing) violence of colonization, including the practice of cultural oppression against indigenous Canadians, but also of actual, race-inflected misogyny amounting to the serial killing (or time-lapse mass murder) of native women. Daunting but rich.’ – George Elliott Clarke, The Chronicle Herald

‘A gritty, vituperative account of the violence associated with colonial practices, the systemic violence inflicted against the Indigenous, and the appropriation of their territories. [Zolf’s] 'poetic forms and language are sharp and intelligent. [They] eschew poetic and moral effustions ... to great effect.’ – Linda M. Morra, Canadian Literature

Praise for Neighbour Procedure: 

‘This is an extraordinary collection of poems, and yet I hesitate in saying this, since something happens to poetry in these pages, so I no longer know what precisely poetry is or can be. In fact, Zolf brings an incredible range of readings to bear on the poetic line. If there is a mixing of media within these lines, there is also a proliferation of tongues, an effort to let language collide to produce a more acute and anguished experience of war. Israel and Palestine recur in the fits and starts of meditation offered here where language follows unpredictable sequences and finds itself suddenly stuttering in its vowels. There is mourning, rage and some brave and difficult effort to speak across traditions, languages, to avow loss, to expose the colder rationalities of occupation and war, and a linguistic fathoming of the ethics of proximity. This is courageous and moving work that feels like the struggle of a lifetime condensed into potent lines.’ – Judith Butler 

‘Neighbour Procedure is the most realized conceptual-modular book of political poetry I’ve read to date; Zolf’s language-motion escapes several nation-states’ culture capture zones while re-threading the very notion of self-representational purposivity.’ – Rodrigo Toscano

‘This book is a sharp, painful cry against the tyranny of the monologic.’ – Charles Bernstein

‘There is a madness in thinking the problem of Israel and Palestine can be thought through or sorted out, a philosophical conundrum or puzzle of language; and there's a despair in thinking that reason has lost its right, leaving all to violence. In Neighbour Procedure, Zolf chooses madness, but yields to despair her suspicion that reason never had a right – only a discourse of ruins, monuments and counter-monuments to hope.’ – Benjamin Friedlander

Syd Zolf has published seven books of poetry, including four with Coach House Books – Neutrøis (2027), Janey's Arcadia (2014), Neighbour Procedure (2010), and Human Resources (2007) – and a selected poetry, Social Poesis, with Wilfrid Laurier University Press (2019). Their theoretical text No One's Witness: A Monstrous Poetics was released by Duke University Press in 2021. Honours Zolf has received include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and finalist for several other prizes, including two Lambda Literary Awards, the Raymond Souster Memorial Award, a Vine Award, and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. They live in Philadelphia and teach at the University of Pennsylvania.