Desert Apocrypha - poems by Zach Hively

Winner of the 32nd Annual Reading the West Book Award.

When Zach Hively moved back to New Mexico, he found his new home not in the city but in the high desert where things made a different sort of sense. He wrote these five suites of poems from that place—feral and introspective, playful and mindful—and made a book that feels as analog as the desert itself.

Zach Hively is the author of Wild Expectations from Casa Urraca Press. He writes the award-winning Fool’s Gold column in addition to other creative nonfiction and poetry. He lives near Abiquiu.

This bookstore edition is run on 50# creme paper with a matte laminate paperback cover, printed and bound in the United States.

“Desert Apocrypha is a testament to the secret life of making new things, when poets become who they really are, outracing and dodging expectation and fashion and consensus, unencumbered by workshops, teachers, even special readers, allowing themselves to say what’s in them to be said. Zach Hively knows the metaphor of the desert by heart, both the hermit’s retreat and the paths of pilgrims and death-defying explorers. That is why his poems are so richly spare, so warmly restrained that metaphor replaces stone and distance as it flows from the underground as apocrypha, as products of authenticity, outside the canon, saying through him what only he can say.  “

- V. B. Price, author of Polishing the Mountain, or Catching Balance Just in Time: Selected Poems 2008-2020

"Have you ever spent time, after dark, under the galaxy of stars, rocks on your back, sand between your toes, and fresh crisp air filling your lungs? Desert Apocrypha inserts your being into the depths of desert imagination and mental texture surrounding us all in the land of enchantment. Zach Hively delivers, yet again, a palette of feelings and visuals that no one can ignore.”

- Magdalena Lily McCarson, author of Type