Matthew Zapruder

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder 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.

Why Poetry

A third collection of poems mixes humor with themes of love and loss and draws upon past personal experiences in a search for self-revelation.

Come on All You Ghosts

David Lehman

Matthew Zapruder picks the poems for the 2022 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a selection of the year’s most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work. For The Best American Poetry 2022 guest editor Matthew Zapruder, whose own poems are “for everyone, everywhere...democratic in [their] insights and feelings” (NPR), has selected the seventy-five new poems that represent American poetry today at its most dynamic. Chosen from print and online magazines, from the popular to the little-known, the selection is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series. The series and guest editors contribute valuable introductory essays that illuminate the current state of American poetry.

The Best American Poetry 2022

Expansive and tender, the poems in Sun Bear, the fourth collection from Matthew Zapruder, move from grand contemplation to intimate revelation in the space of a few lines. Following a languid stream of consciousness, Zapruder’s poems begin as a faint inkling, an early bloom of thought, and swiftly unfold with both humor and melancholy into wide-reaching meditations, their colliding emotions unveiling an amazement with the present moment. The image of a dead spider leads to visions of an upcoming marriage, which lead in turn to workmen sitting around a fountain, reading “silently together and alone.” Complicated states of mind guide our attention as we encounter some of the loneliest locales in modern human life—and some of the loveliest. Always willing to risk sentiment as he navigates a subtle, sometimes wincing sense of the absurd, Zapruder writes poems that are fully alive and alert. Sun Bear reveals a web that connects us all.

Sun Bear

Father's Dayquestions how one embodies a good father, partner, and citizen in the fluctuating political atmosphere of this century.

Father's Day

Jonathan Lethem

Steve Almond

Mary Ruefle

Edward Carey

Daniel Wallace

Caitlin Horrocks

Dean Young

Paul Lisicky

Rikki Ducornet

V. V. Ganeshananthan

Donald Revell

Tomaz Salamun

John Hilgart

Literary fiction with elements of the fantastic, the futuristic, the surreal, and the strange.

Unstuck

"As seen in the The New York Times Book Review ""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. "

Joshua Beckman

A political anthology from the front lines of American poetics.

Matthew Zapruder

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