Nicole Zdeb

The End of Welcome

The End of Welcome sinks a blade into the loam and crust of human experience to unearth fresh layers of feeling and meaning. With wit and wordplay that both suture and transcend time, these singularly voiced poems travel underground and underwater through intimate landscapes to mysteriously surface in the universal. By turns comic, absurdist, and poignant, this collection holds themes of grief, resilience, and joy as a shell held to the ear holds the sonic image of the sea, as the heart holds the fallout of a suicide, and the body holds defiant against and bends to the machinations of progress.

Cover design: Kenji C. Liu
ISBN: 9781950404186
Paperback: $18
Publication date: November 1, 2025

Nicole Alston Zdeb is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. She holds a MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Bedouin Press published her chapbook, The Friction of Distance. Recently, she’s had poems, photographs, and short stories accepted by Driftwood Press, Lana Turner, SWWIM, and other journals.

Previous Publications & Awards

Adolphus; Basalt Magazine; Bennington Review; Blue Lit World Lit; Blue River Review; Cathexis Northwest Press; Change Seven Magazine; DMQ Review; Driftwood Press; Flying South Journal; Foursquare; Gulf Coast; Gyroscope Review; Hole in the Head Review; Humble Humdrum Frock; Ibis Head Review; Interim Journal; La Piccioleta Barca; Lana Turner Journal; Lily Poetry Review; Little Patuxent Journal; Magma Poetry; Masque and Spectacle; Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit; Not Very Quiet; Parcel; Peregrine Journal; Quarterly Conversation; Spittoon International Literary Collective; Stone Poetry Journal; SWWIM; The New Guard; The Same; Two Serious Ladies; Typishly; Underwood Press; VOLT; Wicked Alice; Willowaw Journal; Word For/Word; YEW Journal

Machigonne Prize in Fiction, 2023, “Field of Saints”

Bridport Prize for Poetry Shortlist, 2021, “Lake Darling”

Booranga Prize for Poetry, 2009, “Casual Hills Surround Me at Night”

Excerpt from The End of Welcome

The end of welcome

Offer terms not eligible

for data mining

then conflicting rumors

of a night raid

take your AI,

your epic challenges,

and test summer’s resolve

ask it for unreliable artifacts

that speak with global accents

IP pirated from Eden’s first June

a carbon advantage

in a digital deluge

VPs of Weariness

wet-eyed crocodiles

know how to complicate

a perfectly good process

whatever latitude finds you,

Water Cutter, chief of fast

networks, crypto honey,

and wicked-good algorithms

the time is now

to defeat engines

of radical debasement

despite sustained focus groups,

we have no idea what real people

created or destroyed or the sounds

of their epics under the Wolf Moon

busy designing better engines,

market advantages,

and impractical rhetoric

when what most people want

is a viable future

shaping knowledge

fighting for control

over the underlying sensations,

different sequences loaded –

each a separation

hand-picked by narcissists

to simulate promise fulfillment