Matthew Zapruder
Matthew Zapruder Poems
the orange ball arcs perfectly into the orange hoop
making a sound like a drawer closing
...
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
also known as beruang madu
...
In Milwaukee it is snowing
on the golden statue
of the 1970s television star
...
Oh this Diet Coke is really good,
though come to think of it it tastes
like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,
...
Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world
is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep
their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred
...
I hate the phrase "inner life." My attic hurts,
and I'd like to quit the committee
for naming tornadoes. Do you remember
...
these days
sometimes you sleep
in a purple t-shirt
that says Massachusetts
...
strange coin I would call bronze
on what feels like earth's last morning
I stand in the kitchen just holding
...
I like the word pocket. It sounds a little safely
dangerous. Like knowing you once
bought a headlamp in case the lights go out
in a catastrophe. You will put it on your head
...
In Wichita Kansas my friends ordered square burgers
with mysterious holes leaking a delicious substance
that would fuel us in all sorts of necessary beautiful ways
...
Friends, what is beauty? Right now for me these paper replicas
I glanced at in a book I did not buy. Paper Toys of the World. I hardly
think of anyone but myself. For a little while right now
...
It's the start of baseball season,
and I am thinking again
as I do every year
...
the dead spider rested on my windowsill
using one piece of paper I pushed it
onto another piece of paper
then dropped it accidentally
...
Drunker than Voyager I
but not as Voyager 2 I rode my blue
bike back through the darkness
...
I wish I would
like a ship
that all night carries
its beloved captain
...
This morning I rode my gray metal bike
through the city throwing its trucks at me,
sometimes along the narrow designated
lanes with white painted symbolic bicyclists
...
In old black and white documentaries
sometimes you can see
the young at a concert or demonstration
staring in a certain way as if
...
When people travel across the country they often call it the land
sometimes they carry polarizing filters for their cameras
these filters remove certain components of light
...
It may feel good to go wherever.
Desires lead you into old familiar
destructive awareness. Going a thousand
...
Matthew Zapruder Biography
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 most recent book of poetry, Come On All You Ghosts[3] (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), blends humor and invention with love and loss. His poems have appeared in The Boston Review, The Believer, Fence, Bomb, McSweeney's, Jubilat, Conduit, Harvard Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. In 2007, he was a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas.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 & 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.)
The Best Poem Of Matthew Zapruder
My Childhood
the orange ball arcs perfectly into the orange hoop
making a sound like a drawer closing
you will never get to hold that
I am here and nothing terrible will ever happen
across the street the giant white house full of kids
turns the pages of an endless book
the mother comes home and finds the child animal sleeping
I left my notebook beside the bed
the father came home and sat and quietly talked
one square of light on the wall waiting patiently
I will learn my multiplication tables
while the woman in the old photograph looks in a different direction
Matthew Zapruder Comments
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3/15/2026 12:17:22 AM # 1.0.0
