About the Author

Marc Zegans is the author of the poetry collection "Pillow Talk" and two spoken word albums, "Marker and Parker" and "Night Work." He comes to "The Underwater Typewriter" through the bayous and backwaters of American poetry, having been the Narragansett Beer Poet Laureate, and a Poetry Whore with the New York Poetry Brothel-which "Time Out New York" described as "New York's Sexiest Literary Event." Marc has performed everywhere from the Bowery Poetry Club to the American Poetry Museum. As an immersive theater producer, he created the Boston Center for the Arts' CycSpecific "Speak-Easy" and "Salon Poetique: A Gathering of the 'Tossed Generation.'" He also has been MC and co-producer of "The No Hipsters Rock 'n Roll Revue" and co-producer, with Karen Lee, of "Burlesque for Books." Marc lives near the coast in Northern California.

Reviews

"The Underwater Typewriter is a stellar work. Rarely does anyone combine Zegans' formal sense of space and syntax with such underlying passion and profound perception. For me it rivals John Ashbury's "Flow Chart" and Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems." It's a game changer in terms of form and language, one that will win over "many hearts." Read it!" -Lo Galluccio, Past Poet Populist of Cambridge, vocalist, and author of Hot Rain and Sarasota VII.
"Marc Zegans is a punk-poet and a poet-punk. In The Underwater Typewriter he is as equally at home in the city gutter as he is on the high seas, chronicling tales of mortality from deep in our past to deep in our present. Zegans possesses a keen understanding of history, but also writes with the eye of an anthropologist, the ear of someone who, like my mother, can listen to multiple conversations at once, and the storytelling skills of a griot." -Michael Stewart Foley, author of Dead Kennedys' "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables" (33 1/3), professor of American Political Culture and Political Theory, University of Groningen
"No clichés.... No subtle walks through the park sniffing daisies.... No bullshit... Marc shocks his subjects with electric intensity of remarkable descriptive imagery while diving deep into unfiltered waters, getting beneath the currents of human interactions to lock eyes with his subjects before fetching his underwater typewriter. Each poem through the 133 pages is tightly crafted with laser-light jolts of focus without compromise. Marc journeys unleashed through unchartered waters from East to West coasts with the hardened intimacy of a lover and a dreamer without remorse, able to reflect his natural gift of crafting a poem." -Brian Morrisey, editor Poesy Magazine
"Poet Marc Zegans offers an extraordinary collection of poems that probes the deeper nuances of love, desire and creativity, and the crushing weight of despair, emotional peril, legacy and mortality. Displaying impressive formal technique, Zegans explores the often harrowing depths of the human psyche with wit and intelligence." -Deborah Oster Pannell, Miscreant Magazine
"Childlike and adult - heart-wrenching and cruel - sensual and distant - remembered and present, in The Underwater Typewriter, Marc Zegans weaves opposites into poems that feel like a breath held in excitement, wonder, longing and expectation - I swim in his words and feel somehow comforted when I recognize every single typewritten word as my truth." -Erin Cressida Wilson, playwright, screenwriter, and author.
"Zegans adopts a splenetic, acerbic voice in many of the poems in this rich and varied collection. In "P(un)k Poets: Too Fucked to Drink," he loosely adopts the structure of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" to update his predecessor's mid-50s wail, dragging the drama forward in time with references to Jello Biafra and Ronald Reagan, looks back with nods to William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman and John Lee Hooker in a three-part tirade-spunky, sparky-before turning to Ginsberg himself in the final stanza, in a fractured, fragmented and spirited collision of image and energy." Recalling the deeper meanings once entwined in that subcultural milieu, he perceives only shallow surface in today's poseurs and knows it's time to hang up the cool shades that once hid his own benzedrine pupils." -Simon Warner, editor of Howl for Now and author of Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture