Book(s)

Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best (Orison Books, fall 2025)

✧ “In Jane Zwart’s remarkable debut collection, nothing is taken for granted: not cormorants or sweetcorn, not jealousy’s twinge or a child’s limitless questions, not grief’s slow transformations or gratitude’s anchoring. I marvel at the generosity, grace, and self-awareness of these poems, and at the gorgeous play of their language. Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best is a wonder.”

–Catherine Pierce

✧ “Details and descriptions dazzle throughout Jane Zwart’s Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, an exceptional book that is exactly what it claims to be. It’s full of curiosities, hard-won insights applied against timeless questions, worries big and small, loss, light—life. Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best is magical and moving because Zwart makes sure we’re right there with her for everything she sees—the darkness on the path, the unexpected flower just about to bloom, God and atoms and everything in between.”

–Michael Kleber-Diggs

✧ “It feels like a such a miracle to read Jane Zwart’s Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best. Her poems offer a sturdier kind of faith which welcomes the weight of the world—‘there is nothing with which / you can still life.’ Through syntax that shimmers in its muscularity, the poems that make up Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best sing into sharp epiphany: ‘a place / where the road curves, and I, following, steer / toward brilliance.’ What the poet has brought is a life clarified in lyric, a world whittled down by living through it.”

–C.T. Salazar