Greg Zorko wants to wander with you—through the glowing aisles of Hy-Vee, past the hushed powerlines of ice fishing huts, and into the “room of being massively relaxed.” These are poems of great permission. They document a world held together by city planning forums, genre-appropriate metal, municipal ambivalence, grilled fish dinners, and the not-so-small miracle of a dog’s tail “signing in a language that is easily known.”
Zorko’s poems don’t perform epiphany. They let it arrive on its own, often in disguise: “like sometimes they will call an angel / a man / just some guy.” Somewhere between devotional collapse and weekday routine, Zorko reimagines worship—not as a grand gesture, but as a kind of soft repetition, “monkish, repeating / in a God exhausting way.” These are prayer poems for people who forget to pray, poems that mistake fluorescent light for revelation and find comfort in the way a fish moves through ruin.
There is absurdity here, yes. And tenderness. And grief made mundane by how persistently it shows up. How To Wear Makeup In A God Honoring Way does not pretend to have the answers. Instead, it stands beside you in line at the grocery store, holding the plastic bag of red snapper, and offers the sacred act of just paying attention.
Images by co-editor Chelsea Tadeyeske occasionally punctuate the page and offer a complex, layered rendition of texture and play—visual interruptions and invitations that echo the tonal shifts and conceptual pivots Zorko so deftly navigates.
Greg Zorko was born in 1990 in Albany, NY. He is the author of Ghost in the Club (Metatron, 2016) and Chirp (Ursus Americanus, 2018). He currently lives in western Massachusetts.
Chelsea Tadeyeske is a poet and bookmaker from Milwaukee, WI where she co-edits pitymilk press and curates poetry readings in her apartment, The Bell Tower. She is the author of several chapbooks including If You Bend It Backwards Nothing Really Happens (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2017), Princess Diana (Bathmatics, 2019), Island Weather (pitymilk press, 2022) and Orange Poems (pitymilk press, 2024). She is a Virgo sun, Libra rising, and Aquarius moon born in the year of the snake.
28 pages. Hand sewn. Cover laser printed on craft card-stock
Originally printed in June 2025 with a formal release on July 15th, 2025
Free shipping to US on orders over $40
| Weight | 0.125 lbs |
|---|---|
| tier | 1, 2, 3 |
