The Pajamaist
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
"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 apartment
symphony number two
listens 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.
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."
