Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best
poems by Jane Zwart
*available for pre-order*
Orison Books
paper / 74 pp. / $18.00
ISBN: 978-1-949039-68-9
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
ABOUT THE BOOK
As its title hints, Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best insists on the links between congruous and incongruous things: the rusting moon and a katydid, Eden and Yugoslavia, blackbirds and imaginary numbers—not to mention between any two people. Jane Zwart has hoarded wonders large and small in these poems, holding them up beside life's inevitable pain and grief. Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best demonstrates an enduring faith in the written word to bind us closer together, in our sorrows and in our joys: “Every poem // is riddled with holes. But I am threading two tin cans’ / punctured ends that you might know me yet.”
PRAISE
“In Jane Zwart’s remarkable debut collection, nothing is taken for granted: not cormorants or sweetcorn, not jealousy’s twinge or a child’s limitless questions, not grief’s slow transformations or gratitude’s anchoring. I marvel at the generosity, grace, and self-awareness of these poems, and at the gorgeous play of their language. Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best is a wonder.”
—Catherine Pierce
“Details and descriptions dazzle throughout Jane Zwart’s Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, an exceptional book that is exactly what it claims to be. It’s full of curiosities, hard-won insights applied against timeless questions, worries big and small, loss, light—life. Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best is magical and moving because Zwart makes sure we’re right there with her for everything she sees—the darkness on the path, the unexpected flower just about to bloom, God and atoms and everything in between.”
—Michael Kleber-Diggs
“It feels like such a miracle to read Jane Zwart’s Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best. Her poems offer a sturdier kind of faith which welcomes the weight of the world—‘there is nothing with which / you can still life.’ Through syntax that shimmers in its muscularity, the poems that make up Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best sing into sharp epiphany: ‘a place / where the road curves, and I, following, steer / toward brilliance.’ What the poet has brought is a life clarified in lyric, a world whittled down by living through it.”
—C.T. Salazar
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Zwart teaches literature and writing at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals, including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Threepenny Review.