MATTHEW ZAPRUDER , POET

“Matthew Zapruder is a dangerous poet; his poems implicate us in demonstrations of lift-off and escape velocity while also proving the calamity of gravity.”
—Dean Young.

Born in 1967 in Washington, D.C., Matthew Zapruder is a widely published poet and translator, as well as the founder and Editor in Chief of the acclaimed poetry publishing house Verse Press (now Wave Books). His first book of poetry, American Linden, was the winner of the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize, and came out in 2002. His second collection, The Pajamaist, was released by Copper Canyon in 2006. His book of translations from the Romanian, Secret Weapon: The Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu, will be published by Coffee House in 2007.

Zapruder teaches creative writing in the MFA Writing Program at the New School in New York City, where he is the co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series. He also teaches as a member of the permanent faculty of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In May/June of 2007 he was be a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, TX.

About American Linden, Dara Wier writes, "There is an assumption that we share an intelligent, intimate and necessary understanding. And that is shocking. It cuts to the core. If I were to look for someone to tell my troubles to, or to celebrate what bears celebration, I'd go find the poet who wrote this book." Publishers Weekly noted the book was, “sure to receive cognoscenti attention....Zapruder's hip lyricism offers both the slippery comedy and a surprisingly grave, ultimately winning, commitment to real people, emotions, locales: ‘My lack of compassion astounds me,’ Zapruder explains, ‘and must not come to know itself’; another poem ends as the poet himself is admonished, ‘Come back when you have something/ less riveting to say.’

ABOUT Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House)
These spare and allegorical later poems of Romania’s great poet, Eugen Jebeleanu (1911–1991), are deeply moving expressions of collective and personal guilt from an artist whose early participation in and later disillusionment with the regime lend his work a particular, searing authenticity. Appearing in English for the first time, these profoundly unsentimental poems are politically and artistically significant lyric testimonies.

ABOUT THE PAJAMAIST (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)
The Pajamaist pursues with confidence, directness, and expansiveness, the stylistic and emotional concerns of the familiar subjects of contemporary lyric poetry – love, loss, and mortality. Zapruder’s poems do this with humor, clarity and linguistic inventiveness, and with a welcome and timely concern for social and political issues (albeit idiosyncratically). The title piece, a prose synopsis for an unwritten novel, describes a futuristic world in which suffering can be transferred “to professional sufferers, and examines the nature of suffering: is it necessary or inevitable, and what sort of responsibility do we have for the suffering of others as well as our own?” Two long, formally innovative poems anchor the manuscript: in “Water Street” (an homage to the late poet James Merrill, in whose Stonington, Connecticut apartment Zapruder lived as the Merrill Writer in Residence) and “Brooklyn With a New Beginning,” narrators in moments of great change meditate with humor and tenderness on their respective personal pasts, aesthetic values and what lies ahead.

REVIEW of The Pajamaist by Publishers Weekly
Charming, melancholy, hip and at times hopeful, the 21 poems of Zapruder's second collection take on personal subjects and meditate on life in cities and towns, friendship, love and the nature of poetry itself. In surprising, often lengthy narratives, Zapruder (founding editor of Verse Press, now Wave Books, and author of American Linden , 2002) makes huge associative jumps, interjects playful imagery ("I love / baseball, it makes me angry / and hopeful for justice") and offers unlikely characterizations of places and ideas: "Go, Jerry, soon you will be / in Canada where / Neil Young was born." "There Is a Light" pays tribute to the venerable institution of the New York City bodega ("in silence you have been here / forever since 1993"), and the sequence "Twenty Poems for Noelle" attempts to console a grieving friend. The title poem, a several-page piece in prose, outlines an imaginary novel about a pajama-wearing man who takes other people's suffering on in their stead. "Water Street" recounts the experience of being the poet-in-residence at the home of the late Ouija board-wielding poet James Merrill. Most moving is a longish poem that portrays Zapruder's hometown of Brooklyn, with its "row of dented Sundays." (Sept.)

NEW RELEASES PAGE