Matthew Zapruder – författare

“Zapruder is the ideal narrator to debunk mistaken ideas about the art and claim that the ways we teach poetry are what prevent us from enjoying it.” —San Francisco Chronicle

In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.

Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose.

Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

“A consistently surprising work that shows novices how they can navigate poetry while providing a wonderful re-education for anyone who was taught to dissect a poem as if it were a dead frog.” —The Washington Post

"Charming, melancholy, hip."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Zapruder's innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal

Matthew Zapruder's third book mixes humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to "a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun." The title poem is an elegy for the heroes and mentors in the poet's life—from David Foster Wallace to the poet's father. Zapruder's poems are direct and surprising, and throughout the book he wrestles with the desire to do well, to make art, and to face the vast events of the day.

Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rateis 9.4 percent. I have no idea what that means. I triedto think about it harder for a while. Thentried standing in an actual stance of mysteryand not knowing towards the world.Which is my job. As is staring at the back yardand for one second believing I am actuallyrising away from myself. Which is maybewhat I have in common right now with you . . .

Matthew Zapruder holds degrees from Amherst College, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of two previous books, including The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was honored by Library Journal with a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" listing. He lives in San Francisco and is an editor at Wave Books.

"Charming, melancholy, hip."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Zapruder''s innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal

Matthew Zapruder''s third book mixes humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to "a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun." The title poem is an elegy for the heroes and mentors in the poet''s life—from David Foster Wallace to the poet''s father. Zapruder''s poems are direct and surprising, and throughout the book he wrestles with the desire to do well, to make art, and to face the vast events of the day.

Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rateis 9.4 percent. I have no idea what that means. I triedto think about it harder for a while. Thentried standing in an actual stance of mysteryand not knowing towards the world.Which is my job. As is staring at the back yardand for one second believing I am actuallyrising away from myself. Which is maybewhat I have in common right now with you . . .

Matthew Zapruder holds degrees from Amherst College, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of two previous books, including The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was honored by Library Journal with a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" listing. He lives in San Francisco and is an editor at Wave Books.

"Zapruder’s hip lyricism offers both the slippery comedy and a surprisingly grave, ultimately winning, commitment to real people, emotions, locales."—Publishers Weekly

Matthew Zapruder is a young poet reinvigorating American letters. In his second collection he engages love, mortality, and life in New York City after 9/11. The title piece, a prose-poem synopsis of an unwritten novel, turns all literary forms upon themselves with savvy and flair, while the elegy cycle "Twenty Poems for Noelle" is a compassionate song for a suffering friend.

Noelle, somewhere in an apartmentsymphony number twolistens to you breathing.Broken glass in the street.What was once unglowing glows . . .

The Pajamaist is an intimate book filled with sly wit and an ever-present, infectious openness to amazement. Zapruder''s poems are urbane and constantly, curiously searching.

"Zapruder''s poems don''t merely attempt beauty; they attain it."—The Boston Review

"Matthew Zapruder has a razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture."—The New York Times

"With dynamic, logically complex sentences, Zapruder posits a world that is both extraordinary and refreshingly ordinary."—BOMB

Matthew Zapruder''s poems begin in the faint inkling, in the bloom of thought, and then unfold into wide-reaching meditations on what it means to live in the contemporary moment, among plastic, statistics, and diet soda. Written in a direct, conversational style, the poems in Sun Bear display full-force why Zapruder is one of the most popular poets in America.

From "I Drink Bronze Light":

Great American summer lakesright now I am flying above youthrough a rare cloudless transparent skyback to the city where it is alwayscold even in summerthe round hole I press my face againstshows only a blue expansewith white sails belowspeckled exactly the waythe Aegean would have beenthree thousand years agoif one could have seen it from abovemaybe riding in the dark clawof a god who didn''t care. . . .

Matthew Zapruder is a poet, translator, and editor at Wave Books. He is the author of three collections of poetry, and his book The Pajamaist won the William Carlos Williams Award. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many publications, including BOMB, Harvard Review, Paris Review, the New Yorker, McSweeney''s, and the Believer. He lives in San Francisco, California.

""In characteristically short lines and pithy, slippery language like predictive text from a lucid dream, Zapruder’s fifth collection grapples with fatherhood as well as larger questions of influence and inheritance and obligation."" —The New York Times

“[Zapruder] presents powerfully nuanced and vivid verse about the limitations of poetry to enact meaningful change in a world spiraling into callousness; yet despite poetry’s supposed constraints, Zapruder’s verse offers solace and an invaluable blueprint for empathy.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Zapruder’s new book, Father’s Day, is firmly situated in its (and our) political moment, and is anchored by a compelling gravity and urgency.” ―The Washington Post

The poems in Matthew Zapruder’s fifth collection ask, how can one be a good father, partner, and citizen in the early twenty-first century? Zapruder deftly improvises upon language and lyricism as he passionately engages with these questions during turbulent, uncertain times. Whether interrogating the personalities of the Supreme Court, watching a child grow off into a distance, or tweaking poetry critics and hipsters alike, Zapruder maintains a deeply generous sense of humor alongside a rich vein of love and moral urgency. The poems in Father’s Day harbor a radical belief in the power of wonder and awe to sustain the human project while guiding it forward.