Covalence

About Joseph Zealberg

Joseph Zealberg, M.D., works as a psychiatrist in private practice in Charleston, South Carolina, and at the Ralph H. Johnson V.A. Medical Center. He is also a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina. This is his first book of poems.

Praise for Covalence

Covalence is one of the most original manuscripts I’ve ever read. Completely haunted—read: motivated—by history, war and, as it happens, life in a Veteran’s hospital, the book succeeds as a kind of homage not only to the triumph over adversity, but what it means to live between the living you make and the living you just barely survive. It is, finally, a book about how to be brave.
—Michael Klein, author of The Talking Day

Warfare and other violent cataclysms imply a terrible severing of the bonds of human community. Covalence explores many painful forms of spiritual and social alienation that accompany what we now call “the moral harm” done by traumatizing violence. From poems that address family experiences during World War II to those that address the experience of veterans of our recent wars, verbal and imaginative energies help renew our sense of how crucial the “covalent” bonds between us are, and help us remember that we must, as Auden wrote, love one another or die.
—Fred Marchant, author of The Looking House

“Where do I wash my pile of soiled feathers?” a veteran asks a psychiatrist in these extraordinary poems. Where, indeed, in an absurd world often shaken by trauma and heartbreak. Whether about childhood, family, vets with PTSD, or love—these poems, genuine and necessary, take us to the interior. To the red-hot center of things, exactly where the reader needs to be.
—Susan Laughter Meyers, author of My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass

Zealberg’s poems are pyrotechnic, verbally athletic, and courageously deep. This book would have impact enough if it were half its size—the feats of language are absolutely dazzling—yet Zealberg maintains the high pitch across this broad canvas, continually surprising, continually presenting levels of art that never flag or relent. You will be astonished at the poems’ range and luminous fabric.
—Frank X. Gaspar, author of Late Rapturous

In his poem, “A New Beginning,” speaking of a severely injured veteran, Zealberg writes, “He’d been a handsome soldier, it was hard to look.” But he does look, and his gaze spans centuries in this poetry that overflows with rich language and an almost hypnogogic rush of image and memory. It is Chagall meeting Kafka with the intensity of prayer and chant. It is a rich journey from early 20th century Romania to contemporary Charleston, from darkness to light. In sorrow and in joy, this poet looks and does not flinch, and we are the richer for it.
—Richard Garcia, author of The Persistence of Objects