Description

 

Cycling at Sunrise

 

by Fred Zirm

Join Fred Zirm on his “daily meditation” of cycling at sunrise. Whether he traverses real or virtual roads, he draws parallels between cycling and his own life—and all our lives—on this rapidly spinning planet. You shouldn’t text and drive, but Fred shows us all how to compose poems, full of grace and humor, while biking down the road of experience.

Early Praise

Fred Zirm’s Cycling at Sunrise is a poetry collection that gives us an insider’s view on bicycling as a sport for the person who is an adventurer at heart, but it is more than that. Zirm gives us a kind of bike rider’s philosophy. We learn how to see the world whether on a bicycle in the streets or atop a life cycle. We learn how to deal with aging and injury. We learn to stop and really look because it is necessary to see when one is riding in Mayville,  New York or on a virtual recreation of the Tour de France. What matters on a bicycle is what matters in life.  We must stay focused  and present in the moment. Zirm’s poetry reminds us of this truth.

—JOHN BRANTINGHAM, author of Life: Orange to Pear

 

Fred Zirm’s Cycling at Sunrise captures the spiritual essence at the heart of the poetic practice of cycling. Through exploring all that the word “cycle” embodies, these fine poems also offer good advice for living our best lives. Zirm is obviously an avid cyclist who speaks with earned authority, offering up sharp, vivid descriptions of his rides, but you don’t to be a cyclist to appreciate these poems. Regardless of your own rituals and routines, your own triumphs and failures, you will find a human life at the center of this book—a life moving through its own cycle with grace, wit, humility, and good will. This unified, in-depth plunge into a cyclist’s world, life, is everything a good chapbook should be.

—JIM DANIELS, author of An Ignorance of Trees

 

At one point in Cycling at Sunrise, Fred Zirm counsels, “Never apply either brake/in mid-air.” Like a poem, a bike “offers no pretense/of protection.” It’s “nothing but two/slender wheels plus two winking/lights, signaling anyone who can see Here I am. Here I am. Please remember me.” A “sermon in sweat,” this wonderful book discovers that “what helped cause the crash/helps the healing.”

—RALPH JAMES SAVARESE, author of Never Make Them Cry: Classrooms & Coffins

 

 

 

About the Author

Outside of directing plays and teaching drama and English, riding and writing have been Fred Zirm’s two main occupations – not at the same time, although he does often think of ideas for poems while on his bicycle. On the cycling side, he has completed several century rides, competed in time trials and road races, solo toured through Greece for a month, and climbed some of most famous ascents from the Tour de France. On the writing side, his work has been published in about a dozen small literary magazines and anthologies, including Still Crazy, cahoodadoodaling (Pushcart Prize nominee), NEAT, Chautauqua, Voices de la Luna, Greek Fire, Poeming Pigeons, and Objects in the Rearview Mirror. His first poetry chapbook, Object Lessons, was published in January 2021 by Main Street Rag and his second, Rescue Dogs, in July 2023 by The Poetry Box. Fred has retired from teaching but not directing (or riding and writing) and lives in Maryland with his wife, Robin, and younger daughter, Sara, who put up with his rather time-consuming hobbies.