A Sacrificial Zinc

Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize Series

by Matthew Cooperman

A Sacrificial Zinc impels the reader on a journey into the nature of place. Written out of a vanished suburban landscape, Matthew Cooperman’s book ― part navigational trope, part metaphor of embodiment ― enacts the complex weave of identity as a series of places, lovers, influences, and natural objects. The landscape itself is beautifully particularized as the desert and mountain spaces of the American West, and the flora and fauna of the Pacific Rim. From “the blue Pacific exactly the color of cold” to “the magnolia leaves [of California] / in the first scuttle of fall,” these lovely poems ground a journey in that “little better thing than earth.”

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

About the author

Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), w/Aby Kaupang (Futurepoem, 2018) as well as Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, w/Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press, 2011), DaZE (Salt Publishing Ltd, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Five chapbooks exist in addition, including Little Spool, winner of the 2014 Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and Disorder 299.00 (Essay Press).

A former Fine Arts Work Center fellow in Provincetown, Cooperman was a founding editor of Quarter After Eight. He is currently a poetry editor at Colorado Review and teaches at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, CO with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children.

Reviews

[Mackenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book by Matt. Experimental but heartful.