Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world--the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined--with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation and hope. AMERICAN LINDEN is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which--by means of language--move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world. "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.
Synopsis
Winner of the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize, here is a book that is, essentially, love poems--to scarecrows and barns, to women, friends and spring. Severe at times, it is also steady and surprising. American Linden has something for everyone--it is thoughtful and thought-provoking, wandering with grace through the streets of the heart.
About the Author
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.