Zazen

Somewhere in Della's consumptive, industrial wasteland of a city, a bomb goes off. It is not the first, and will not be the last.

Reactions to the attacks are polarized. Police activity intensifies. Della's revolutionary parents welcome the upheaval but are trapped within their own insular beliefs. Her activist restaurant co-workers, who would rather change their identities than the world around them, resume a shallow rebellion of hair-dye, sex parties, and self-absorption. As those bombs keep inching closer, thudding deep and real between the sounds of katydids fluttering in the still of the city night, and the destruction begins to excite her. What begins as terror threats called in to greasy bro-bars across the block boils over into a desperate plot, intoxicating and captivating Della and leaving her little chance for escape.

Zazen unfolds as a search for clarity soured by irresolution and catastrophe, yet made vital by the thin, wild veins of imagination run through each escalating moment, tensing and relaxing, unfurling and ensnaring. Vanessa Veselka renders Della and her world with beautiful, freighting, and phantasmagorically intelligent accuracy, crafting from their shattered constitutions a perversely perfect mirror for our own selves and state.


Author: Vanessa Veselka
Publisher: Red Lemonade
Published: 05/22/2011
Pages: 274
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781935869054


Award: Oregon Book Awards - Finalist
Award: Literary Award - Winner


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/28/2011
Library Journal 06/01/2011 pg. 94

About the Author
Vanessa Veselka (Portland, OR) has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother. Her work has appeared in bust, bitch, maximum rock 'n' roll, and elsewhere. Zazen is her first novel.



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