Beautiful Zero

“Beautiful Zero’s speakers tumble and swerve as they urgently try to inhabit and describe the contours of being strange and alive in our electrified now. There’s a hint of dread, apprehension, to the speakers’ searches for connection and understanding, but the book’s primary argument seems to be for beauty, joy, surprise, release. To read Beautiful Zero is to follow a pack of holy fools right off a cliff―but there’s a buoy in the sea at bottom, a life preserver, a raft.”

“I could not believe my good luck—on a chilly grey day—to find such a reckless gem of a writer. It was more than I deserved. But I’ll take it. I’ll take the sideways entry into meaning; the ability to say ‘so sue me’; the demonstration that we have nothing to lose. Jennifer Willoughby gets out in front of language, catching it off guard, creating striking thought systems under the skin. These poems are effortless formations of spontaneity.”

“Astonishing. These poems get under your skin and stay there. Oh, and did I mention how funny they are? We should all pray to have Jennifer Willoughby sitting next to us at the next boring meeting we have to attend, whispering her poems into our ears. We’ll leave that meeting disoriented, more than a little dazed, and strangely happy: life will never again be quite the same.”

“As Jennifer Willoughby knows, the cape of childhood is flammable. Here is a poet dying to trust her beginnings even as she puts a quick fuse to American suburban girlhood. These poems sing. They are tight, fierce, grisly, and funny.”

“Beautiful Zero reverberates with our own essential weirdness. Like radio antennae receiving the strange monologue unfurling inside us, these poems are ‘tuned to insular human music trying to get out.’ Jennifer Willoughby’s matter-of-fact tone enriches her eccentric vision and this book persistently surprises with synaptic leaps and dendritic movement. In its search to ‘embrace what it means to be here’ Beautiful Zero makes both the marvelous and quotidian buzz with brilliance.”