Spool

by Matthew Cooperman

Threaded to place, and unraveled by days, our bodies wear the evidence of intimacy. How to dwell, day after day, how to make it go? In the spirit of A.R. Ammons' Tape for the Turn of the Year, Matthew Cooperman's Spool spins life's residuum as a vertical through-line of resistance. It is domestic errata needled into poetry, or the system of winding plots that make and unmake our beds; it is airwaves dreary with acts of war, and the frank consequences of love: "vow to increase/fear to diminish/eyes and hours/as ours not/yours it's rub/ the bottle and/rattle the flowers/toil the wheel/and trouble errors." Written as a formal dare to new marriage Spool's "year in threes" evolves into a ten-year survival constraint to cope with sleep deprivation, childhood illness, war culture and time's erasure. By turns skeptical or ecstatic, Spool is also wired to sound, syntactical invention, and surprising joy. By this act of compression Cooperman shows just how extraordinary the ordinary can be: "some more new/thinking about about/say equitas madness/dove in cleft/the lover's face/the devil's own."

Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

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

[Brianna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to say I didn’t enjoy this very much. I didn’t like the 3 word lines because it made reading it very choppy and I couldn’t find a good rhythm. This in turn distracted me from making meaning. Honestly, I think most of it went straight over my head. It felt like a near meaningless stream of consciousness half of the time, although I recognize there was a lot of thought in sounds and word play. It certainly references lots of other works and has fun exploring the kinds of conversations you can have though the poetry. Most of that was lost on me though. There were, however, a good collection of wonderful lines, which is what bumped my score up to 3 stars. I think you have to be really immersed in the world of poetry and literature for this to be a fun read, and as much time as I spend reading, I don’t think I fit into that requirement.