Love Doesn’t Work the Way We Want: Interview with Charlie Zacks – Manuel Marrero
March 9, 2026
MM. The last poem in this collection is called “Goodnight Moon,” a nod to the popular children’s book. There’s a lot of white space surrounding the words here, on certain pages, much like in the classic book. It prompts me to sit with the words and think. It’s almost interactive, or functional. It often suggests something is just out of reach of what is expressible. One can read it prayerfully, slowly, like a book is more of a conversation piece, or some architectural structure, than a linear pageturner you get through. I can’t help but feel like this is a surgical outstripping of expectations for a book. What sort of moment in literature are you stepping into? What is the moment you are meeting here, within yourself and outwards? Is the idea of a poem more than the poem itself? The book seems an about face at times. Is this the end or the beginning of a conversation?
CZ. I think the moment I’m stepping into is one where poetry is no longer seen as this romantic, decadent exploration of the ways to dress up mundane ideas. I think poetry right now is a lot more about economy. I like poems that “go for the jugular” as my 9th grade English teacher Ms. DT described it. With my first chapbook, Riffs, I tried writing poems that were synthetic in a way in that they combined the fabrics of many different things I loved—gay romance novels, coming of age stories, post-hardcore music, and lit mag poetry. For Who Will Find My Body, I was less interested in this kind of mixture and more interested in simply trying to figure out why I was feeling the way I was. I was moving away from Montréal where my life was easy and amazing. Back to the USA where everything feels accelerated and competitive and terrifying. So I started looking inwards, as most contemporary poetry does, and found myself constantly gazing outwards. The moment I’m meeting is a hypercontemporary one fueled by eschatology, doomerism, and a general hopeless malaise, but also one of romantic re-emergence. The world always feels like it’s ending these days but then it just keeps going. And there’s something romantic about that, I think.
MM. The book seems pro-experience. You quit cigarettes because you want to live long enough to die alone (paraphrase). There’s very little you haven’t tasted. You’re young. You’re building things. Intangible things like movements, publishing imprints, and gathering tangible things like DIY printing equipment in your workshop, to create tangible things that cultivate metaphysical things. What is the impetus behind your movements these days? Are you concerned with legacy and influence? I’ve always tried to foster things outside of institutions in elemental ways. I think an object has a history but it becomes reducible to a serial number in the era of POD. When the means of production is a vanguard, are you even in conversation with institutional art?
CZ. I have no idea what institutional art is at this point. Our cultural institutions have been attacked so heavily that I think any of my counter-institutional rebelliousness has mostly subsided. I am more interested in existence than resistance I guess. Sorry for the rhyme. I live this whole ass life surrounded by complete people with their own mechanisms for understanding the world. I see myself as part of a lineage of people who exist in times of constant chaos and make art about love. Edmund White, David Wojnarowicz, etc. These are people who made lives for themselves in crumbling worlds. My own legacy is in God’s hands. I will do my best to make something great while I’m alive. We will either all become mindless zombies or experience a humanistic renaissance. There is simply no other way. So I’m putting everything I’ve got into the latter.
MM. Of all your works, this one seems more blunt, cathartic, and lean. There is the fact of the matter. There is raw rage, and cynical distance. And there’s the reader’s response, which obviously, is withheld. How is this one special to you?
CZ. This book is a scattershot approach to trying to cut a biopsy of my life. It’s interior in that I’m writing out my own thoughts, but those thoughts are largely about the world around me. I’m fighting for a life.
MM. We both really like Lou Reed and Dennis Cooper’s writing/music. The former’s birthday just passed so he’s been on my mind. What do you relate to about these two figures? Do you prefer Minor Threat or Fugazi? I prefer Minor Threat.
CZ. RIP Lou. I think both LR and DC inspire me in that they both seem asynchronous with their surroundings. Their stories are stories about people trying to love in a hostile world. Look at “Caroline Says II”. She says, “Life is meant to be more than this.” Life is meant to be more than this. DC’s George Miles Cycle really hinges on a similar propulsion: love doesn’t work the way we want it to. It’s fucked and gross and it destroys you. Their shit is controversial, I know, but I think that’s because both artists point to ugly truths we don’t want to look at. All the sick stuff we run from. Stuff that keeps you up at night. I don’t know…maybe I’m just a sicko. I prefer Minor Threat. “In My Eyes” is such a raw tune. I love Fugazi too, but I think MT captured lightning.
MM. We both study theology, albeit toward different ends. Why theology? Is that what’s next?
CZ. I wanted to ask the biggest questions. Studying philosophy didn’t feel like enough for me. It felt like pushing around sand. I like theology because I get to think about God. I get to, just for a moment, imagine the transcendent. Hold it in my hand. Spin it around and see what it does. It makes me cry all the time. I cry so much studying theology. It’s so difficult to find ways to encounter beauty as beauty, ideas as ideas, God without all the extra shit. Theology is the best way to do that. To enter into the conversation and humble yourself before the infinite. Everyone should do it. We are so small.
MM. One of the reasons I value you as a friend and collaborator is that we disagree on things, sometimes passionately. It gives me hope, because very few people seem capable of engaging with disagreement, and sources of truth are increasingly mutable. What would Mark Fisher say? Is the world more interesting when we’re talking or killing each other?
CZ. I value you for the same reasons. I think people have this strange, very new tendency to want to destroy each other. I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but the Internet definitely accelerates it. I fall victim to the impulse sometimes, but I try my best to remember that love doesn’t come from all that. Love just happens. Friendship is based on mutual respect. I respect you enough to believe that you believe your ideas to be correct. You respect me enough to do the same. We have different epistemologies. The ways we make or find meaning are fundamentally different. But we share more than we don’t. Mark Fisher would probably say that we’re all fucked anyways. I don’t think people should kill each other. I think we should try our best to value life more than that. Even if it’s hard. It’s because it’s hard that it is worthwhile. Something like that.
MM. Is intimacy dangerous, meaning, is there risk involved? How big is the risk? Are you built for it? I’ve been the tip of the spear and while it’s integrated in my life story, I don’t think I want to risk harming someone I could love anymore. What are the spoils of violation, of trespass?
CZ. Intimacy, like anything worthwhile, involves sacrifice. I’m built for it in that I’m always thinking about it in some way, but I do worry often (and I think you picked up on this) that I’m not meant to find love, but to search for it. Two very different things. Even when I’ve felt love, it’s fleeting. Which is maybe the point, but love to me seems like it should be sustained. I have this whole blog I’ve been writing for four years where I basically chronicle my experience as a person barely in this world. I used to fall in love with men and women all the time. In different ways, yes, but still. Like Maria in Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, or Wojnarowicz’s own affairs with women, I guess. I love and then explode. It’s been a while, though. I’m callused. I’m afraid it won’t happen again. I need to be opened up.
MM. My favorite poem in this is probably “I Can’t Find You.” It evokes for me the fragmentation of self through the memory of someone. Do you do this in memory of someone?
CZ. Thank you. I wrote this poem in memory of the ghost of several lovers. Sounds dramatic, but yea. I fell in love a few times in college. Montréal is a good place to fall in love. “I Can’t Find You” is mostly about this Aussie guy I fell for a few years ago. He was an exchange student in Montréal for a semester. Everything he did seemed so effortless. Watching him interact with other people was a gift. He made me feel so small and when he touched me everything came together like a rubik’s cube. And I was aligned with myself when I was with him and out of line when alone. I lived alone at the time in a weirdly fancy apartment downtown. I’d cry in the elevator and go up on the rooftop and watch the skyline. Wait for him to call me. Or text. Or show any sign of interest. He read my work. Some of it was about him. He said it made him cry. Which was the closest we ever got. He told me he couldn’t see me anymore and a few weeks later moved back to Australia. His Canadian phone number discontinued. Never heard from him again. The poem is about trying to recover some semblance of that feeling. He still haunts me and I can’t find him anywhere.
MM. I feel like one of the secret chords here is health of the body. Do you work better when you feel physically healthy? Is there a part of you that works better under corporal pressure, or threat of corporal harm? Do you think of longevity, or eternity, when you write, and publish, and publish others?
CZ. I think constantly about the health of my body. I exercise everyday and try to eat well and everything. I have a few chronic conditions which make my health particularly salient. I think I work better when I feel physically healthy because I feel some sense of control. I don’t think of longevity, though. I never thought I’d live this long because I was such an anxious and disastrous teenager. So this is all a kind of victory lap. I think more about eternity and eternity haunts every decision I make.
MM. What is your ethos for discernment when it comes to whether something is worth publishing? For me, I literally hear it, in my ear. My brain catches up later, but if I don’t hear it first, I can try to force it but chances are if I’m thinking about it before feeling it, it’s not for me. I definitely feel everything you write first, and my logical brain is left reeling trying to justify it. There’s a truth of honest witness to it.
CZ. I think that is something we have in common: a certain discerning voice that calls us into precarious situations and asks us to risk our safety, privacy, and stability for the sake of something greater. For me, I see myself in a legacy of artists. I have heritage, although not always familial, that helps to ground the decisions I make. It is something that helps me see beyond the aesthetics and clout-chasing of today’s artistic world, I think. It’s important to follow that inner voice and to see it as in line with something beyond yourself. I’m not all that great, but I inherit greatness.
MM. Do you write or publish with a specific reader in mind? I find this helps me because it’s impossible to predict how every single person will be affected by the power of words. Someone could be disturbed by the same content that titillates someone else, but crossing the threshold where you get a powerful reaction can’t be tested. It’s an act of faith. Since I can’t control for everything, I write for my ideal reader. I suppose someone like me.
CZ. My family is terrified of my work. I used to be a musician and all my songs were about death and dying and drugs and stuff and my parents worried all the time. It’s hard because I don’t want to put them through all this, but I have to follow my calling and make the kind of art I make. I never chose to be a poet. It honestly sucks. I wish I could be an attorney or a construction manager or something, but I have to hurt myself in my art. I’ve been doing it since I was a preteen. I just have to do it and I’m sorry. I try not to think too much about it because it freaks me out. I’m covered in all these scary tattoos. “YOU WON’T GET WHAT YOU WANT” tatted on my abs and Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide note on my right side. “God make it painless” on my right forearm. I embody this shit. I don’t know how else to live. I freak out and then remember my lineage. I remember what matters and my mind calms. I have no ideal reader. I’m just lucky anyone reads my work at all.