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Once Dormant Volcano is a gathering of thoughts and insights on the rise and eruption of influences, life changes, and chronic illness in the life of Rhonda Zimlich. Through vivid depictions of vast environments, Zimlich illustrates how, much like a volcano, emotions build pressure internally before erupting, often causing destructive outbursts and reshaping the landscape. This collection highlights the physical reactions fueled by deeper underlying feelings such as hurt, fear, and frustration, while discovering connections that cool the magma of an eruption or awaken the passions of relief.
Rhonda Zimlichis the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at American University in Washington D.C. She writes about intergenerational trauma and the unbreakable spirit of youth. Her debut novel, Raising Panic, won the Steel Toe Books 2023 Book Award for Prose. Other works have appeared in Brevity, Past-Ten, American Writer’s Review, and others. She was awarded the 2020 Literary Award in Nonfiction from Dogwood, a Journal of Poetry and Prose at Fairfield University. The same essay earned her an honorable mention in Best American Essays. She received the 2021 Fiction Award from Please See Me, and the 2024 Nonfiction Award from Barely South Review. More at www.rhondazimlich.com
PRAISE:.Rhonda Zimlich‘s sensational debut, Once Dormant Volcano, maps the intersection between the fullness of sensuous experience and the incremental losses the body endures as it meets the effects of MS that “robs…the sensation of touch.” Zimlich’s volcanos in their threatening dormancy indeed serve as a brilliant overarching metaphor for the “invisible disability” between its exacerbations and flare-ups. But as each volcano stands backdrop to the dailiness of life, the other side of the volcano is its presence as the reminder of brute power, the boom of adolescence, the strength and resilience of our humanness. “She’s just doing,” the author writes of her own life, which could also be said of this beautiful book, “what mountains do/when they’re becoming.”–David Keplinger, author of Ice
Rhonda Zimlich’s Once Dormant Volcano elegantly and movingly explores the origins of life as seen through the volcanoes which have shaped our existence. Here, those volcanoes we can’t see beneath the sea and those in the story of our own lives resonate metaphorically with the unpredictability of the body itself, the mystery of how we are born with what may eventually harm us lying dormant in the sea of us. In Zimlich’s deft telling, the future does work its way to the surface as disability lived as one with love and dailiness, less fate than a force reshaped in the dynamic flow of the poet’s consciousness and ours for, as she writes, “. . .we die by living/ And live that way, too.–Maxine Scates, author of My Wilderness
In Once Dormant Volcano, Rhonda Zimlich announces, “I’ve gone to ground to find myself again,” and so she takes in and through the bodies of volcanos both ancient and new, dormant and active. These poems rumble like a volcano with something to say.–Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete
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