Marc Zegans’ Lyon Street is a book of longing, lost and found love for a place and a people that have long moved away from the haven San Francisco was in the 1980’s and 90’s. Victorian houses in need of a paint job then, not an alarm system; Cop cars alit amidst riots that rose as reaction to police brutality. Language of the time not sanded down and soaped up in a gauzy lens, written to reflect where Marc was then. Where the post hippie bloom died and birthed a punk scene of outsiders, poets, artists. In his new book of poems, Zegans, like the spirits that possess the body of each poem herein, guides us through San Francisco as it was. He is talking shorthand here, but for those not familiar with the landscape, subdivisions, and jarring neighborhood lines of demarcation in the San Francisco of that era, you will undoubtedly catch it in the prose and pruned back peel that allow you in. Zegans’ previous books of poetry and spoken word albums signposted that he was no one trick pony. He is one of those writers digging for a new old world. Pulling up bricks of sand from the depths of the ocean to expand his imagined and real worlds. This book is one he has been meditating on for decades and it shows.
Check out this short film featuring a reading by Zegans from the book married to a sculpture created by Noah James Saunders specifically for the poem North Beach.
Marc Zegans’ book Lyon Steet is available for preorder now.