The Pajamaist

"Zapruder's hip lyricism offers both the slippery comedy and a surprisingly grave, ultimately winning, commitment to real people, emotions, locales."-Publishers Weekly
Â
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.
Â
Noelle, somewhere in an apartment
symphony number two
listens to you breathing.
Broken glass in the street.
What was once unglowing glows. . .
Â
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.
Â
In the fall of 2006, Zapruder will participate in the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour, an epic fifty-day reading tour of America that is being billed as the biggest literary event of 2006-certainly one to make and sustain buzz.
ÂMatthew Zapruderwas born in 1967 and holds degrees from Amherst, Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. His debut volume of poetry, American Linden,received the Tupelo Press Editors'Prize. He is founder of Verse Press (now Wave Books), lead guitarist for The Figments, and co-curator of the KGB Reading Series. He teaches at the New School MFA program and lives in New York City.

"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.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Founder of Verse Press, Zapruder is a leading younger poet whose work is risky, fabular, urbane.

Poetry. Matthew Zapruder is a young poet reinvigorating American letters. In THE PAJAMAIST, 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. "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 (born 1967 in Washington, D.C.) is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor. His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. His first book, American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002) won the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize. His poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Fence, Bomb, McSweeney's, Jubilat, Conduit, Harvard Review, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. In 2007, he was a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas.[2] He is the winner of the Tupelo Poetry Editors' Prize and the 2008 May Sarton poetry award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As of late 2008, German and Slovenian language editions of his poems were planned from Luxbooks and Serpa Editions. Luxbooks is also publishing a separate German language graphic novel version of his poem "The Pajamaist." He was co-founder (with Brian Henry) and editor-in-chief of Verse Press, which has since become Wave Books and moved from Amherst, Massachusetts to Seattle, Washington. Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman, who became friends when Beckman performed a reading in Amherst, are co-editors of Wave Books. Zapruder received his B.A. from Amherst College, his M.A. from the University of California - Berkeley and his M.F.A. from the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He teaches in the low residency MFA program at the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert and at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He lives in San Francisco and is the brother of American musician and songwriter Michael Zapruder, and is the guitarist in the American band The Figments.