John Schertzer is a poet and hybrid writer whose work moves through surreal association, linguistic systems, fractured narrative, and the strange logic of ordinary objects. His books include Second Nature and Bellamonia, and his poems have appeared in journals including Big Other, American Letters & Commentary, LIT, and The Cortland Review.
Second Nature
Second Nature, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2023, is built around shifts in voice, system, object, and perception. Its sectioning and recurrent formal devices turn the collection into a field of unstable connections. Language keeps discovering new relations between the sensate world and the structures people impose upon it.
A 2026 Big Other contributor note identifies Schertzer as the author of Bellamonia and Second Nature. The poems there continue his interest in unstable being, odd metaphysical pressure, and sentences that move by association.
Language and system
Schertzer’s work repeatedly treats language as an active environment. Lists, diagrams, broken continuities, comic turns, and surreal images make the poem feel like a machine whose rules are discovered while it runs. That attention to process places his work comfortably within the experimental traditions gathered in Contemporary Poets.
John Schertzer in Shampoo
Shampoo published Schertzer in Issues 6 and 20. Issue 6 lists Drop Scenes, a title that later reappears as a section name associated with Second Nature. Issue 20 lists Out of Another. Together these appearances preserve an early record of the surreal association, shifting systems, and fractured narrative that continue through his later work.
These publications place Schertzer within Shampoo’s archive of contemporary poets and connect his work with a broader field of experimental poetry.