"Gail Mazur's poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppo's First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazur's four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem. Mazur's explorations of "this fallen world, this loony world" are moving acts of empathy by a singular moral sensibility. Her poems brave the most urgent subjects - from the fraught luscious Eden of the ballpark, to the fragility of our closest human ties, to the implications for America in a world where power and war are cataclysmic for the strong as well as the weak."--Jacket.