forthcoming from what books press on october 7, 2025
preorder from bookshop, barnes and noble or amazon
zirconium ash out october 2025 published by what books press
in los angeles
centered around loss and death of individuals, relationships, and ways of communicating, the poems of zirconium ash drive at intensified high speed, physically and psychically mapping the geography of the city of los angeles. weaving and zigzagging, mingling grief, sorrow, and lament, the poems haunt and are haunted by the living and dead. the culture of the city and family history often blur in these poems, which can feel in conversation with themselves as well as others—fragmented ghost narratives that lyrically confront history, poetics, and the crimes and unjust actions of government.
freeway poems, a driver’s night soliloquies refracting city lights through gleaming obsidian glass, “78 on the 90 & searching for my abuelito’s voice”—-glancing backwards once in a while, jimmy vega is glimpsed in the rearview mirror, our gaze crosses his. these freeways loop through dreams and regrets, memories and grief. “95 on the 105”—-we’re driving through the dark with headlights switched off—-a thomas guide abandoned under the seat after google maps appeared on everyone’s phone, revised here as the jimmy vega guide. you’ll recognize the freeways at night and the signs. you’ll recognize this inner city. in these poems l.a. is always on fire.
—sesshu foster, author of eladatl: a history of the east los angeles dirigible air transport lines
there is an incandescent calm at the core of jimmy vega’s tumbling, raging, epic freeway lyrics. the poems map los angeles, a “city rot with ghosts,” family history, as well as the crimes of the u.s. government. i feel the tendril traces of wanda coleman here, where city pavement is as much a canvas for what is spilled, as these pages are for capturing grief, anger, despair. these poems keen and are anthem—i wish i had this book to keep me company during my formative years living in la.
—diana khoi nguyen, author of root fractures
from the stunning ars-poetica-as-freeway opener to the sleeping angel “on blue / graphite pavement” of its penultimate lines, zirconium ash performs an exorcism of the self, a reckoning of civic amnesia, a “five-car collision” of things ever on the verge of being lost to the stupor of los angeles, a “city persimmon in afterglow.” as this rebellion of the senses gives way to shades of marigold, wildfire, and carbon monoxide, jimmy vega encounters his own suffering and arrested breath in that of family separations, police brutality, lethal air-borne elements, and concussive, algorithmic low-theory deliriums, drawing us ever closer and in concert with these vatic, expansive poems, such that “i can almost taste the snare of my own language.”
—roberto tejada, author of carbonate of copper
to read jimmy vega’s elegiac, anguished, and expansive poems is to experience an unleashing of ritualistic force that, at times, rushes at 78 (or 95) mph and, at others, stops on a dime before a surprising voltaic turn. this is a poetry of ghosts, of angels, of vulnerable bodyminds—all seasoned with the flavor of “iron & ash / from burning los angeles.” vega practices—and preaches—a dionysian formalism that rejects the oppressive sun of apollo. this is why ash—that which remains after the fire, that which teeters on the brink of existence and an ecstatic scattering of annihilation—is such a potent figure in this book. as for zirconium: by some accounts, the word comes from the arabic word “zargon,” which means “gold-like.” zirconium ash revels, then, and reveals itself in a sometimes jubilant and sometimes jarred jargon that is more shiningly potent and subversively cinderous than wallace stevens’ “gold flourisher”: “if you show / me your parasitic apathy, i’ll show you / the zirconium ash in my brain.” when “empire leaves [us] gasping” and when we’re “driving towards a vanishing ecosystem,” every day is the day of the dead; and that, vega insists, is cause for lyric celebration even if such lyricism is articulated through a “flutter of iambic / convulsions,” through a “song of bleeding throats.”
—michael leong, author of contested records: the turn to documents in contemporary north american poetry
jimmy vega’s poignant zirconium ash bring us to a california only a poet knows how to describe. as vega puts deftly and concretely: “this is not an allegory—this is another freeway poem.” but "another" is modest here because of how the freeway measures life so fully: how it courses through these pages only in the way vega can move. his poetry, like the freeway, traverses through the “goddamn” world or “lake” and gets us to think about the work of the poet right now: “about locking myself in stanzas & calling it a closet—a tiny room this is a poem about cages around a goddamn lake where do you put the houseless when you take away their less—when you un-shelter their home?” the poems imprint themselves in the “less” and inhabit all the more with which we need to think, encapsulating an essential vernacular and wit we desperately yearn for in this very moment.
—prageeta sharma, author of grief sequence
zirconium ash is a hole-punched sheaf of watch reports from vigils at the bedsides of the dead and dying; thus, everyone everywhere, though especially los angeles. jimmy vega perches there red-eyed and teeth uncollected as the ailing breathe in “skid row piss cigarette / freeway carcass splat ash”—then, breathed out as cempasúchtil ash, the book’s incremental refrain and evidence of ecological, sociopolitical, and personal fortunes “in graveyard motion.” ashes, ashes, we all crawl down the 710, the 5, the 91, these the rivers vega’s known, charred under the same “endless sun” that’s surveilled herrera, coleman, bukowski, and 150 years of riots. the same sun stink-eyeing everyone everywhere now. with these delirious yet lucid poems, vega stands in that light and he doesn’t even squint.
—douglas kearney, author of i imagine i been science fiction always
jimmy vega’s los angeles is a freeway necropolis, where the living and the dead shoot past each other at high speeds, mingling voices—and flesh. i don’t know if i’ve encountered poetry that engages the experience of the freeway with this uncompromising intensity—vega’s asphalt corridors are thrilling, ghostly, and all too real. in creating this poetry vega sings us—with gritty angeleño lyricism—into a basic lived reality of la: that a few minutes from any given place down a roaring tube of concrete strangers are hurtling alongside each other in metal boxes at 80 miles an hour, each inside the emotional enormity of their cluttered lives, each inches from death, each themselves filled with their own ghosts. he also does not spare us this basic truth, that every day, someone among them will not make it home.
—anthony mccann, author of i am the dead, who, you take care of me