A Retreatant's Guide to Disappearing, by Michael Zysk

Poetry, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

People need to retreat: to remember the vastness within and beyond, as big a panorama of the self that one can bear. In peak moments, the self that separates the inside from the outside thins, even pops. Deep, unmediated insight arises: gnosis of the source of everything without center or words. Apart from nature, there is no self-knowledge.

A Retreatant’s Guide to Disappearing braids eco- with theo poetics, inquiring into the ground of the self, which the most sophisticated wisdom traditions of the world regard as empty of any autonomy. The self that an ego assumes doesn’t inherently exist. Rather, the self arises with and as a changing, flowing fullness. All the while, a nameless witness abides.

Drawing upon peak experiences in retreat and initiation with Gnostic masters, poet and essayist Michael Zysk observes a witness of the self through Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic lenses. This hybrid essay of seven sonnet triptychs honors wildlife encounters and numinous places in California, Nevada, and Italy, inviting the reader into the fullness of self-knowledge.

Michael Zysk is a queer mystical revivalist whose essays, reviews, and poetry have appeared in Religion and the Arts, Earth & Altar, Forma Journal, Amethyst Review, Ekstasis, and American Poetry Review. Wipf & Stock published his third poetry collection Sophia’s Wisdom in 2024. He’s an alumnus of the 2021 Community of Writers and 2022 Kenyon Review Summer Conference. He lives to connect at michaelzysk.com.