Dear Friends,
I hope you’re all well as we move into fall, or as I like to call it, Bye Bye Leafies season. I’m on a semester long sabbatical, which seems to mainly involve catching up on long deferred tasks and getting reacquainted with my guitars, amps, and effects pedals, and playing with some good friends here in a new band called The Date Nights, as well as with my old friends The Figments back in Western Mass. I’ve also begun making our bed daily, a practice I highly recommend for its extremely high ratio of self-satisfaction to effort.
But on this Tuesday I’m glad to write you to let you know that Scribner is publishing a new book of my poems, called I Love Hearing Your Dreams. Some poems from the book and an interview are here, from the lovely folks at Only Poems. Early reviews have been very kind.
The cover is from a book many of you read in childhood, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. Whilst as a child I personally was far too lost in a leather bound set of the diaries of Winston Churchill, as well as training for the Presidential Fitness Test, to waste time with such niceties, apparently it is a lovely tale about a bunny from the country who shows courage in the face of adversity and eventually achieves her dreams, a lesson I think frankly all of us could benefit and take comfort from in these autumnal times.
I will be doing several readings in the Bay Area, starting September 24th in Berkeley, San Francisco (with Daniel Handler), and Marin (with Jane Hirshfield). I’ll also be in Boston with Steve Almond (well, Cambridge really, but that sounds confusing like I’m going to be in England), New York, and Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., among other lovely places. If you’re around, please come by and say hi to me and my illustrious interlocutors.
You can always go to my website or follow me on Twitter ugh to keep track of what’s up. Or better, just reach out to say hi. If you need a copy of the book for any reason just lmk. I hope this finds you all well. These are really tough and stressful times for so many of us, so my family and I send our love to you. We continue to hope and pray for peace and change.
Love, Matthew
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You can preorder here.
Starred Publisher’s Weekly Review:
I Love Hearing Your Dreams
Matthew Zapruder. Scribner, $26 (128p) ISBN 978-1-66805-980-7
This elegiac and ebullient collection from Zapruder (Father’s Day) weaves through several forms of heartache and loss. “I keep learning if you don’t write it down/ the thought just flies away,” he writes, intent on fixing the materials of dreams, memories, and other disappearing phenomena to the page. The feelings and needs of others are central (“at last the museum/ has become/ a museum of empathy”), as these poems look backwards, almost against their will, recognizing that “life is elsewhere and the past/ always misremembered,” as it’s painted diligently in “the perfect color/ for disappearing/ at night into the deep/ park.” “All solutions are suboptimal” faced with the dilemma of revisiting difficult losses and fleeting joys, but relief, Zapruder suggests, is equally to be found in what was always innately impermanent: “none of us could stop/ laughing at ourselves which in those/ holy wasted days was everything.” These pages are rich with elegies for friends, loved ones, and strangers, but even these are self-conscious about the bind of time and the desire to seek a do-over: “what would/ a perfect elegy do? place the flowers// back in the ground?” Zapruder delivers a work of remarkable wit and disciplined emotional attentiveness. (Sept.)