Zion Offramp 1-50 by Mark Scroggins

Zion Offramp 1–50 Calling to mind the purgatorial flare and matter-of-factness of Weimar painters such as Otto Dix and George Grosz, the hectic tableaux of Mark Scroggins’s chronicle-poem sketch the half-lives of the disenchanted, often smudged away with gusto—and remorse (and humor). The end of the known world is teeming with the suddenly aging, as one might expect, but also with those (old and young alike) who simply feel that the world is changing too fast to remain comprehensible. The dementia of the penultimate, of being left behind—of one’s own remains—becomes the essential condition of everyday life in these intimate and unsparing stanzas.—Daniel TiffanyZion Offramp is freeway-speedy and fitted out with exits to everywhere from the siege of Corioli to a contemporary check-out line to the Cotswolds, and it’s chock-full of all the objects that crowd our late-capitalism, late-consumerism world—GPSs, SUVs, Martians, ouija boards, and bodies in the library. It’s a festival of specif