The Pajamaist

by Matthew Zapruder

“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.


 

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day, as well as Why Poetry, and Story of a Poem. In 2000, he co-founded Verse Press, and is now editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and he was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He lives in Northern California, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. His forthcoming collection of poetry, I Love Hearing Your Dreams, will be published by Scribner in September, 2024.

Reviews

[Teck Wu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dont uds a thing

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading some of the poems back through I'm convinced I prefer Zapruder's more recent work. Come on All You Ghosts is excellent!

This volume seemed a bit more internalized, less of a sharing than a meandering. I found it difficult to connect with the poems as well as I could with his later work.

My two favorites from The Pajamaist are

Tonight You'll Be Able (see the author read it and explain where it comes from. It makes it even better.)

Haiku (for now, I found it posted to a blog)
First few lines:
Yesterday for you
I wrote a poem so full
of lies it woke me
stunned like someone
bitten in the middle of the night

[Mark Babcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new poet I've never read. I love poets who make up useful new words. Schizomniac. Pretty great. I'm gonna use that word in a poem myself some day. The Schizomniac's Dilemma. Can't wait to read more of him. Oh, read his defense of poetry Why Poetry.

Also, yes, he is the grandson of the Abraham Zapruder, who took the assassination footage. Go figure. Can't wait to meet him someday.

[Evan]

"Walk right out
of the smoke and follow

that flower passing
under the window.

It's good to die a little."

[Rebecca]

Matthew is not only a marvelous person (good-natured, personable, occasionally goofy, fiercely smart), he is also a really giving and really lyric poet - lyric not in the generic sense that often stands in for something close to "pretty," but lyric in the truest sense of musical. Matthew is a musician - I suppose that helps - but you can hear it in the language, which at times has the drawn-out quality of sung verses, at times seems to dance, and feels simultaneously surprising and inevitable, like the infinite variation of a refrain the poems always suggest but never actually repeat. Its subject, too, tends to be something I'm a real softy for - place, and the way people move through it. And, naturally, the way it moves through them. In other words, because this is really not supposed to sound like a blurb for the book cover, it's really good.

[Philip Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zapruder's poetry makes me feel more human ��� and what I mean by that is not that: "feel more connected to the world or others..." sort of feeling. It's more that when I read work from this book: I seem to inhabit myself more. It helps me live within body and mind and that other third part which is undefinable.

I recommend picking up a copy from your local independent bookseller, or better yet, from the Copper Canyon Press website: www.coppercanyonpress.org

When you purchase directly from a non-pforit publisher you contribute to continuing the support of voices that tend to go unheard.

��� Philip Swanstrom Shaw

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

i couldn't get into this book...i tried to get into this book as i've read some nice reviews but could not get into this book.......many of the poems in this book were cold and clinical...

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book of poems. A bit hard to get into in the beginning, but I thought the title poem was provocative and captivating. I also loved the poem January, for the below lines:

"making an aftersound cave I love to sit in
and listen to part of me scaring that part of me
willing to crawl just a bit farther out onto
the sound of ice long after I hear it cracking."

Another favorite line comes from the poem Cat Radio, simply, "spring was constructed/precisely to make us/feel like a leaf licked by a dinosaur"

Overall, I would suggest it. But give it a little patience, and try reading a few out loud because he isn't a fan of punctuation and it's easy to lose breath mentally within the lines.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

some of the poems in this are really sublime. some are not so much my style, but I'm pretty sure if they were they'd be sublime. so... 4 stars?

[Greta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am always a house
with nobody in it
not the middle of winter
not even me
taping plastic to the windows
to keep cold air
filling the house with sails.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know when I've been entranced by something so non-linear ("kaleidoscopic"?) I am amazed at how I stayed inside the poems. I wish I could write like this.

[hr arch · Rating 4 out of 5]

some of the poems in this are really sublime. some are not so much my style, but I'm pretty sure if they were they'd be sublime. so... 4 stars?

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not Come on All You Ghosts, but this a collection worth returning to. There's a distance here, an effect both of stilted syntax and emotional restraint, that's absent from his next and better collection, but he still managed to grab me with his propensity for belabored adjectival phrases ("Yesterday afternoon/ with a giant like a skyline/ full of nothing but laughter/ emptiness in my mouth.")

The heart of the collection is a cycle of 20 20-line poems to Noelle in the wake of 9/11 that sticks and grips whether you take that as context or not. Like Ghosts, it is often the images that stick rather than poems, but the more I read of his work the less I see that as a fault. Exceptions to that are "Canada," "Water Street," and "January."

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another book I had to go out and buy after reading it once. This is one of the three best books of poetry I read in the past six months and it seems unfair to compare it with the Selected Poems of writers who have been writing great poetry for decades...for single volume of poetry it's probably the best book I read in the last six months. A potent blend of European and American lyricism and a sublimely open field type of poem that reminds me of the best William Carlos Williams or Rakosi transposed to the new century....great memorable writing....he's new to me so it was exciting to find this by chance....total serendipity...I want more books by Zapruder....

[Betsy Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

matthew just keeps getting better and better (that's the hope we poets all have, isn't it?). i loved his first book, AMERICAN LINDEN and in this one we get that same, familiar voice (full of charm -- all self-deprecation and humor, but beneath it an intense sincerity and a little bit of pain), but in this new book that voice has a new strength and duration. it sits inside its spaces just a little bit longer, feels a little freer to go on into the next level. look at it out there, flying over the street on a tightrope -- i can't get enough of it.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I admire most in this book are the inventive turns that come from syntax. It creates a sense of joy, and interest, especially in the poems that push at the enjambment. Sometimes the sentence is derailed so that I see differently, sometimes the lineation just makes me see the sentence differently.

What I'm critical of, though, is the title poem of the book. I'm not really sure it accomplishes its mock loftiness really matches up with what I think it actually says. I see how it "leads" the other poems in concept, but I would rather see the concept complicated a bit further.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

from The Pajamaist by Matthew Zapruder:

January

The small cities touch each other with snow.
There's no any longer to miss, only this shadow
phonograph still running its shadow needle
over and over that after-the-record static,
making an aftersound cave I love to sit in
and listen to part of me scaring that part of me
willing to crawl just a bit farther out onto
the sound of ice long after I hear it cracking...

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice work Mr. Zapruder. I preferred the poems that played a little less with syntax--that would be a personal preference. Some moments I loved: "I want to communicate with you/ I'm trying as hard as a human" "you give birth to etcetera's" "the town of you know" "Beautiful plagiarist, come/ to me slowly" "Surrounded by motherfuckers/a boy slaps a red handball" "they look/ up the skirt of the/ night sky" "The small cities touch each other with snow."

[Christina M M Rau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matthew Zapruder. Now he should be on everyone's reading list. He's nutso, but in a very very good way. The title poem goes on for pages about people sleeping and sharing pajamas to never have to suffer. It's brilliant! Brilliant! Every poem before and after that one is so unique, from descriptions to even tiny word choices. He had me screaming yes yes yes. Thankfully, I was screaming inside my head.

[Brooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Digressive and meandering. Often I stopped after about 10 lines of a poem and thought, "how did I get here?" and started over. It didn't always help. Perhaps I needed to spend more time with each line, but I kept reading and waiting for something to catch my eye or ear.

The title poem is based on a pretty interesting idea, which was interesting, but even in that I was waiting for more.

[Cindy John]

I read this book in my pajamas, not because of the title, but because the New Yorker had an article last week about some neuroscientists who are attempting to figure out how insight works in our brains. They said we are most open to insight in the morning when we first wake up.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read these poems today and yesterday while sitting under the deck on the metal lounge chair. i read while drinking a cup of coffee, another cup of coffee, and a beer. The last line in the poem Tonight You'll Be Able set my brain on fire.

[Lourdes Heuer]

Book 19 of 2016. Poetry.
"I'm sure I can see
each week the team
growing increasingly
tender holding
the small thrushes they
probably had to name.
Go, Jerry, soon you will be
in Canada where
Neil Young was born."

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, this was a major disappointment after "American Linden."

[S · Rating 3 out of 5]

1967-

good, it's solid

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

some nice stuff, but i wasn't as consistently wowed as i expected and wanted to be. but the moments that pop really pop big time.

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

the title poem gets 5. i should probably reread it though.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pretty blatant stylistic rip of David Berman's Actual Air.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The "Poems for Noelle" were good, I think. Also, there were scattered observations or lines in many poems that made me smile.

[Maddelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

"It's good to die a little." --from Kill Van Kull

Poems to return to: Haiku, The Pajamaist.