Mariano Zaro

MARIANO ZARO is the author of five previous books of poetry, most recently Padre Tierra (Olifante, Zaragoza, Spain). His poems are included in anthologies and literary journals in the USA, Mexico and Spain. He has translated into Spanish the American poets Philomene Long, Tony Barnstone and Sholeh Wolpé. In 2018, he received the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Fiction Prize. Zaro hosts a series of video-interviews with prominent poets as part of the literary project Poetry.LA. He is a professor of Spanish at Rio Hondo Community College (Whittier, CA).

“Pick up this book and inhabit Mariano Zaro’s world: his boyhood in a Spanish village, hanging plums in strings from the ceiling with his father, the farmer, the inverted heart shape of a hole in a woman’s face, the way the boy needed and was given permission to look, and brought to bear that same humane and unsparing gaze on himself and his own desires, on intimacy and estrangement, on Spain and California. In Decoding Sparrows, Mariano Zaro renders coming of age and hunger in spare and luminous language, an almost crystalline austerity— each word resonant, each word steadfast. Zaro illuminates, he limns his poems in longing.”
—Marsha de la O, author of Every Ravening Thing

“These poems are written in the erotics of the everyday, as if the overflowing sensuality of Cavafy had a love-child with the chaste and restrained style of Raymond Carver. It is like a casting call for a novel by Gabriel García Márquez. And it is real. And it is magical.”
—Tony Barnstone, author of Pulp Sonnets