Paul Maziar is the author of two books of poems: JUNEBUG (Understory Books) and previously, QUICK MILLIONS (Cuneiform Press) plus two books of art writings, ONE FOOT IN THE OTHER WORLD and FLOWER POWER. He's written several chapbooks and is proprietor of Breather Editions and, with Aaron Simon, editor of Ergo Press.

I hear an unerring genius for phrasing in this voice, a poet brimming with charm and ‘self-selecting’ vividness. I am reminded of the work of Eileen Myles, Pierre Reverdy, and John Wieners. The voice is being reshuffled to the point of constant motion, like when a notebook poem just fits together endlessly, and the poet can even speak through someone else’s text with an alarming clarity. Paul Maziar introduces a new way of making poems through addition, subtraction, and through the beheading of storytelling. He is a true hero locked in his quest. Quick Millions is dripping with magic — get a handle on it as quickly as you can.

— Cedar Sigo

Paul Maziar’s poems communicate fluently across bursts of interruption, code-switches, and second thoughts. What gets communicated is an aesthetic of exuberant nonchalance, a devil-may-care attitude that is as attractive as it is elusive. Inner and outer realms converge to paint a cubist picture of experience, alternately dreamlike and awake to possibility, both current and buried deep in the past. “I wake up / a funny form / on a flat speck / of red silt / a million or more years on…” Maziar’s sensibility, refined through his work as an art critic, is relaxed and alert. It’s a breath of fresh air.

— Kit Robinson

The world Paul writes about is the one I desire to live in. He is drawn to expressions of fear and vulnerability, to artist weirdos, to the strange beauty behind the experience of not knowing. I found the book transporting.


— Katherine Bradford

Paul Maziar's ONE FOOT is a chatty carousel, covering the last ten years of art in and around Portland, Oregon. Tumbling between observation, reflection, and digression, he tells the stories of what it's like to be there, in front of that painting, in that art scene, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This has the great advantage of being a critic's 'first' book, where the reader shares in working out foundational concepts of whatever 'art' or 'painting' or 'writing' is or might be. As Maziar says of Marcel Duchamp's 'shaved' Mona Lisa—‘I like that he did this.’

— Jarrett Earnest

Paul Maziar's new collection, One Foot in the Other World, offers special insight into art's effect on a keenly sensitive mind, that of a poet/critic in the tradition of his heroes such as Bill Berkson, Charles North, and John Yau. These ekphrastic musings, reviews, and pithy philosophical observations reveal an impassioned seeker, whether of existential solace in the desert or aesthetic discovery in aimless urban wanderings. Captivated by his desire for knowledge without certitude, we follow him in his marvelous journey.

— Sue Taylor

With no political or aesthetic agendas to ram down our throats, Maziar’s generous eye detects the best in a varied menagerie of both famous and lesser-known artists and writers. He’s the kind of guide whose quiet enthusiasm one quickly learns to trust.


— Trevor Winkfield