The Zoo, a Going by J.A. Tyler
In The Zoo, a Going, the commonplace act of a family visiting the zoo becomes a window through which a child contemplates the breakdown of his family, the loss of a brother he never knew, and his strained relationship with his father, newly back from a war that he cannot comprehend though he can feel its ripple effects. As they travel from cage to bar to glass, Jonah sees himself and his family through the lens of the animals in each fake landscape, and hovers on the edge of the terrible knowledge of adulthood: what his mom and dad have done and haven’t for him, and what he has and hasn’t done in return. He realizes, as he goes, the complexities of growing up, of maturing, and he too how much power words have, both those he utters and those he doesn’t. Equal parts short story, novel, and prose poetry, The Zoo, a Going is part of Dzanc’s commitment to new voices and writers who break the mold to reach something deeply human.
Publication Date: March 2015
Paperback: 136 pages
ISBN: 9781936873654
Also available as an eBook
In The Zoo, a Going, the commonplace act of a family visiting the zoo becomes a window through which a child contemplates the breakdown of his family, the loss of a brother he never knew, and his strained relationship with his father, newly back from a war that he cannot comprehend though he can feel its ripple effects. As they travel from cage to bar to glass, Jonah sees himself and his family through the lens of the animals in each fake landscape, and hovers on the edge of the terrible knowledge of adulthood: what his mom and dad have done and haven’t for him, and what he has and hasn’t done in return. He realizes, as he goes, the complexities of growing up, of maturing, and he too how much power words have, both those he utters and those he doesn’t. Equal parts short story, novel, and prose poetry, The Zoo, a Going is part of Dzanc’s commitment to new voices and writers who break the mold to reach something deeply human.
Publication Date: March 2015
Paperback: 136 pages
ISBN: 9781936873654
Also available as an eBook
In The Zoo, a Going, the commonplace act of a family visiting the zoo becomes a window through which a child contemplates the breakdown of his family, the loss of a brother he never knew, and his strained relationship with his father, newly back from a war that he cannot comprehend though he can feel its ripple effects. As they travel from cage to bar to glass, Jonah sees himself and his family through the lens of the animals in each fake landscape, and hovers on the edge of the terrible knowledge of adulthood: what his mom and dad have done and haven’t for him, and what he has and hasn’t done in return. He realizes, as he goes, the complexities of growing up, of maturing, and he too how much power words have, both those he utters and those he doesn’t. Equal parts short story, novel, and prose poetry, The Zoo, a Going is part of Dzanc’s commitment to new voices and writers who break the mold to reach something deeply human.
Publication Date: March 2015
Paperback: 136 pages
ISBN: 9781936873654
Also available as an eBook
PRAISE FOR THE ZOO, A GOING
The Zoo, A Going is a sudden book, a book full of sudden, frightening (mis)understandings, a book that arrives suddenly and departs suddenly. You’ll need to pay attention if you don’t want to miss it – and, trust me, you don’t want to miss it.
Ken Sparling, author of Dad Says He Saw You At the Mall and Book
Every sentence in this book is a poem. Every sentence is a variation of the utterance that comes before. Every sentence that comes before and after forces us to linger in the space between sentences. Like Stein, like Beckett, J.A. Tyler is a sentence-maker that makes a world out of the sentence. If only there were more sentence-makers in the world like J.A. Tyler. If only the world could be remade in his name.
Peter Markus, author We Make Mud, The Fish and the Not Fish, and Bob or Man on Boat
In Tyler’s hands, static concepts become Möbius strips of subversion. This incredible text is a kaleidoscopic set of bifocals: look up and you’re in a faraway war, down and you’re in a suburban treehouse. Up and you’re the victim, down and you’re the aggressor. What is so important throughout—what Tyler so remarkably and irrefutably convinces the reader of—is all the ways these binaries are indeed, are inescapably, fused together on the same lens.
Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls and Tampa
As readers meander through Tyler's zoo, we see all sorts of animals, humans and otherwise, exposing their true nature. This is a wise and naked examination of the various incarcerations of family life.
Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things that Meant the World to Me and Fight Song
The Zoo, A Going is a sudden book, a book full of sudden, frightening (mis)understandings, a book that arrives suddenly and departs suddenly. You’ll need to pay attention if you don’t want to miss it – and, trust me, you don’t want to miss it.
Ken Sparling, author of Dad Says He Saw You At the Mall and Book
As readers meander through Tyler's zoo, we see all sorts of animals, humans and otherwise, exposing their true nature. This is a wise and naked examination of the various incarcerations of family life.
Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things that Meant the World to Me and Fight Song
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. A. Tyler is the author of Only and Ever This and The Zoo, a Going. His fiction has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. He has given workshops and readings at universities and writing conferences around the U.S., including AWP, Lake Forest’s &Now series, the National Writing Project at Colorado State University, and the Bankhead Visiting Writers Series at the University of Alabama. He lives in Colorado.
