Like Jon Anderson and Larry Levis before him, Zola's domestic landscapes and haunted meditations are both comic and surreal. And yet his overall project, his autobiographical, no-bullshit work, is a luminously beautiful acknowledgment of the human struggle toward the inevitable end of things. It's also, however, a testament that the lived life is more than just worthwhile
From the foreword by David Dodd Lee
When a woman carries a bag of groceries like a grudge into a room wallpapered with the cries of birds, imagination writes the world. Again and again in What Glorious Possibilities, the reader will be both startled and in awe of Jim Zola's provocative and artful imagery. Amid the celebration of these poems, there is a profound resignation: I hear you/sing a song that says/this is the weather I was born into. No matter the situation what can we do but sing and Jim Zola does this extravagantly with a compelling, undeniable beauty that shakes us gloriously alive.