In Zack Rogow''s new poetry collection Irreverent Litanies, the poet grapples with religion and spirituality from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in a militantly atheist home. He surprises himself by sometimes finding the wisdom and beauty in a meditative perspective. With laugh-out-loud humor and deep heart, these poems offer new perspectives on contemporary life, from cloning Mozart to traffic bottlenecks in Silicon Valley to the cycles of birth and death.

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. His poetry collections include The Number Before Infinity and Talking with the Radio, poems inspired by jazz and popular music. Rogow has taught in several MFA creative writing programs and writes a blog, Advice for Writers, read internationally. PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for Earthlight by André Breton, cotranslated from the French with Bill Zavatsky, 1994.Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA) Award for translation of Horace by George Sand, 1996.Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award for founding the Lunch Poems Reading Series; UC Berkeley, 1997. Nominated by Robert Hass.Lili Fabilli-Eric Hoffer Essay Prize, UC Berkeley; 2001 and 1999. Nominated for Pushcart Prize for poem in Tiger's Eye in 2014, in Parthenon West in 2007, and in Fourteen Hills in 2004.Nominated for PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and for Northern California Book Association Award in Translation for French version of Green Wheat by Colette, 2005.Tanka Splendor Award for best tanka sequence written in English, 2006. Celestine Award for Poetry, Holy Names University, 2015.