After two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, Tony was summoned by Uncle Sam. During Lieutenant Tony’s service, the communists avoided confrontation in Germany. Since then, he has taught in schools and colleges in the US. In 1990, he taught at a teacher's university in China where his students convinced him that his writing created too much negative karma. For his penance and salvation he was transformed as an American trapped in Texas. To conceal from editors his age, gender, size, race, religion, politics, and other private predispositions, Tony survives folded up in a back room in Arlington, Texas, working on Alice in Cyberland, his anxiously-awaited solution to the unified field theory.
Tony's book of poems about his life in China, The Mind Dancing, was published in 2009, with art and calligraphy by Vivian Lu. His poetry and fiction have appeared in more than one hundred print and online journals; and his commentaries and op-eds have appeared in many newspapers and journals including the Houston Chronicle, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Online Journal, Dissident Voice, Peace Corps Writers, Democrats.US, Democracy Means You, Writers Against the War, and OpEdNews.
Tony's nonfiction books include Japan: Superpower of the Pacific, China: The Dragon Awakes, West Africa, Daily Life in Hong Kong, China: Nations in Transition, The Japanese Americans, Vietnam: Nations in Transition, Algeria: Modern Nations, Syria, and The Legislative Branch (Congress).
Reviews
“Tony Zurlo's bemused observation of physics and the modern world it stands for is at once clever and poignant. In daringly original contaminations (dare I say 'mashups'?), T.S. Eliot's cat is locked inside Schroedinger's box and Picasso meets quantum theory. Reality is disjointed, 'Up is Down,/Strange is Charm,/Truth is Beauty' and there are no certainties left: 'a land where the truth, the whole truth,/and nothing but the truth is jabberwocky.' The façade of normal life starts to peel off: 'Everywhere he looks/the cracks look back.' Yet, right when despair seem to loom, Zurlo's poetry lifts off in the sublime, such as in the last two lines of Quantum Fatherhood: 'My day over, I relaxed and the wave/ function that was me began splitting into separate universes. Quantum Chaos is meant to be enjoyed as a healing poetic potion against post-modern and post-millennial angst.”
Salvatore Attardo International Journal of Humor Research
“Tony Zurlo’s Quantum Chaos: Learning to live with Cosmic Confusion is a delightful romp through fatherhood, pop-culture, pet-ownership, musicianship, Van Gogh and Picasso using the tropes and language of modern quantum theory, which serves as a leitmotiv—a poetic unified field theory—tying together this unique collection. At once funny, clever and thought-provoking, these twenty-three well-crafted pieces offer a surrealistic intermixture of Fuzzy Theory with fatherhood, worm-holes and word-play, The Beatles and The Big Bang, T.S. Eliot’s cat and Schroedinger’s cat, all with turns-of-phrase and diction as unpredictable as anything governed by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”
James Wilk The Seven-Year Night
“Zurlo has a unique style of language that is a pleasure to read, and after finishing Quantum Chaos, his words remain: 'My temples are exploding stars. My eyes are burned out comets. And constellations creep ever onward into the starry night.'”
R Jay Slais Mice Verses Man
Purchase Quantum Chaos here Big Table Publishing
