Father's Day

by Matthew Zapruder

The poems in Matthew Zapruder's fifth collection ask, how can one be a good father, partner, and citizen in the early twenty-first century? Zapruder deftly improvises upon language and lyricism as he passionately engages with these questions during turbulent, uncertain times. Whether interrogating the personalities of the Supreme Court, watching a child grow off into a distance, or tweaking poetry critics and hipsters alike, Zapruder maintains a deeply generous sense of humor alongside a rich vein of love and moral urgency. The poems in Father's Day harbor a radical belief in the power of wonder and awe to sustain the human project while guiding it forward.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 2019

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

[Ken]

Turns out reading a W.S. Merwin before this one served me well. Like Merwin, Zapruder favors punctuation that's mostly out of favor, disgraced, banished like Romeo. Ditto to capitalization (spare the sturdy pronoun we've all grown to love: I).

His poems are mostly one-stanza string beans, often with only one to four words per line. I think it's supposed to make you read faster, though it makes me read slower. Choppy, choppy appealing to the reader to smoothy, smoothy. Out comes the spatula.

The title hints that a lot of the poems include mention of Zapruder's son, who is autistic. MZ directly addresses this with an afterword at the end. Bonus? The book is written in 2019, and Zapruder goes where angels fear to tread by addressing some political topics. I can live with that more than I can what's on the front page of late.

Here are two poems that intrigued me. Maybe they will you, too.


The Black Bird

I wrote a poem once
I thought it was to be
honest just ok
then it went "viral"
everyone loved it
and soon enough
I almost did too
though I also knew
something nameless
I pushed down
ever deeper
I wrote more
a whole book
named after
the viral poem
it won all the awards
people even
really named
a whole conference
after it and wept
when they even
thought about it
it was far too much
so extreme
it had to be real
what I had done
now whenever
I try to write
I feel so afraid
of feeling nothing
so I just write house
and war
and dapple
everyone smiles
and says yes
but really I just
want to get high
and sit on the porch
of my heart
(yes of my heart
that's what I said)
where I can watch
the city go by
and imagine buildings
have feelings
but whenever I close
my eyes and try
to go there I only
see a black bird
with a yellow beak
staring at me
I keep waiting
but it just stares
back at me
and does not speak
even one word
for the other world


Roseanne Barr

Is there anyone worse
than Roseanne Barr?

she is the spear tip
of white resentment

her fake working-class
caustic humor

can be irresistible
as an opiate

you take to rebel
and become an accomplice

which makes laughing
a kind of fascism

when the time comes
someone should bury her

in the forest
like a mushroom

and put up a big sign
that says don't eat

this poisonous mother

[Kurt Kemmerer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honest, brutally beautiful confessions mark this necessary contemporary collection. Absolutely a must read for any current poetry enthusiast who wants to remain hopeful amidst each day’s losses, personal and political.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is helpful to read Zapruder's "Afterward", but I'm glad I read it AFTER reading the poems. I had been puzzling about the possible meaning of the title, "Father's Day", and caught a few references to his son. The references were soft-spoken and subtle, and it occurred to me that his son might be autistic, but it did not seem the most important reveal at the time. The poems were also filled with a sense of dread that I thought might be my own projection in these waning Trump hours and COVID distress time. To learn, in the Afterward, that Zapruder had been so distraught after the 2016 election (and the diagnosis of his son with autism a few weeks after that) that he had stopped writing until the end of 2017, put the poems in a revealing perspective. I'm glad I hadn't been reading them looking for those traces as my main project, though. I take away a sense of Zapruder and his relationship to poetry as being deeply reflective, aiming for a wide connection. As he says, "Like language itself, every poem contains at lest the flicker of the individual imagination, while somehow, paradoxically, offering the possibility of communion."

[J.D. DeHart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered Matthew Zapruder's poetry a few years back and had the pleasure this summer of reviewing a copy of his latest collection, Father's Day, from Copper Canyon Press. The book is due September 2019.

The poems are intimate and are sometimes focused on the wider world from a critical perspective. In short, these are just the kind of words we need now. Zapruder reflects on his role as poet in works like "The Black Bird," while looking at the social landscape in poems like "Generation X."

Elsewhere, Zapruder addresses public figures like Paul Ryan and Roseanne Barr in social-critical verse. The poet provides caustic words in these pieces, while sharing affectionate remembrance in works like "Behave Thyself."

There's a fine balance of many elements working in Father's Day, and Zapruder arranges his work so that each stanza feels like a pleasant surprise, a stream of perspective and poetic voice. That's why I will keep reading Zapruder...and recommend this book.

[RH Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Due back at the library before finished, but captivating to that moment.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the first three quarters of this book. The line breaks are so wonderful. Short lines and no punctuation, so the meaning of the lines moves forward and backward as I read. I wasn't sure it would work, but I read many of these poems aloud. Their tenderness is haunting. I especially loved the poems about the poet's son and his wife. Then the poems broadened in themes to include the world we live in now, the political world, the environmental world, the world of inequality.

Zapruder includes and afterward called, "Afterward: Late Humanism." In it he describes why his son, who is on the autism spectrum, is woven through this book. "The struggle to accept difference, and responsibility, and to move through real fear and resistance to a new understanding, is just as apparent to me in our public life as it is in my private one, and each feels to me like a reflection of the other and therefore they are together in this book.

My son of course is not a symbol or a myth, nor for that matter a diagnosis. In these poems it is not he but my image of him, animated by my hope and terror and love, that becomes a symbol...I hope (whenever he is old enough to read this) he will understand why it was impossible for me to be a poet and write the truth without including those feelings. I hope he will know that I realize my fear was my own problem. It was something for me to get through so I could see what has always been possible." Two that stopped me: "Poem for Ann Hood" and "4th of July" with its extraordinary ending:
it is fourth of July and this year
this project seems designed to fail
spectacularly taking all of us somewhere
we were destined from the first time
a new colorless race put its foot down
the ground trembled and now at last everyone
thinks they see this project is designed to fail
even the red white and blue star
knows there is no future in the hollow land
without reparation to those who were here
and those we brought but how to begin
is the only question left to ask

Oh, and I loved the last four poems. So many. I will return to these poems. Poems seem to require that.

[Joe Imwalle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of hearing Mathew read from this book. The reading was paired with Ada Limón’s reading of her new book,The Carrying. Also highly recommended and a great companion to Fathers Day. Mathew is one of my teachers in the MFA program I’m in. He’s truly thoughtful and has a sense of humor, both of which show up in these poems. He also cares deeply about the art of poetry and it’s place in today’s world. Also evident in these poems. “Poem for passengers” is my favorite from the collection. But they’re all winners, really. Recommended.

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a bit of a hard time with the no punctuation, fragmented quality of these poems, but there was a lot of beautiful imagery, some piercing moments and a wicked poem on Rosanne Barr, that begins "is there anyone worse than Rosanne Barr?" and ends "this poisonous mother." I connected with that one a little more than his poems to poets. I loved the afterward titled Late Humanism in which he looks at the place of poetry, particularly in our currently calamitous public life, as well as his own life in writing these poems. I would definitely revisit him.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually don't rate books unless I like them, and I almost never review them unless I like them a lot. That presents me with one problem -- what do I do when I like a book even more than the others? This one deserves more stars than I have at my disposal. Here's a short review I did of it for "New York Journal of Books":

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...

[Evan]

"...but really it was not except for their cries
of happiness bouncing off the mountains
surrounding us in the middle of my life
in the middle of my life I felt lost and awake
a patient who has just been told he has
fifty years to live his body a responsibility
now a machine that must like an animal
for some inexplicable reason be cared for..."

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

In “The Pledge,” Matthew Zapruder writes that “no matter how much / everything matters,” his “poems can always // be read by anyone.” This declaration, occurring about a hundred pages into “Father’s Day,” needs no defense, no elaboration, as the previous poems in the collection serve as testament.

This is not to say that Zapruder’s poetry is not without challenge or complexity. To the contrary: many lines demand rereading and careful contemplation, but in return for this effort are the gifts of illumination and connection.

“I believe that even taking into account our very real, essential differences, the basic truths of human existence belong to all of us,” Zapruder writes in the afterword. Poets “stumble upon” these truths and “reveal them, again and again….Like language itself, every poem contains at least the flicker of the individual imagination, while somehow, paradoxically, offering the possibility of communion.”

That interplay between difference and commonality is at the heart of “Father’s Day,” a fantastic collection that I’ll be rereading happily for years to come.

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection by a poet whose past works I have enjoyed has produced here a set of splinters. The collection starts strong with emotional poems relating to fatherhood and to the shattering discovery that his son has been diagnosed as something other than “normal” (we learn in the afterword that’s the diagnosis was a form of autism). But from those early poems, the collection loses coherence, both within poems and between (some of the dissonance powered by an uncontrolled, anti-Trump dismay). Images follow each other like boxcars on a train, but the train gets nowhere. A few gems can still be found: a short takedown of Roseanne Barr is delightfully bitter and vicious, and a hugely ambivalent song to Walt Whitman is powerful. The remainder was dross.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haven’t read a collection in a while, if it matters to you.. always nice to get to know a new voice. Zapruder’s about as famous as contemporary poets get but I’ve never plucked him before. There was some charming stuff here, some little amusing political roasts and tender images of parenthood, but I thought most of the topical poems were tainted with the sort of impersonality that came of out of the literary left after 2016. Being more immersed in the writing world at that time, it felt like trying to eat dinner in a racquetball court. Poems as bumper stickers

[Steve Brock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a Best of the Best for the month of September, 2019, as selected by Stevo's Book Reviews on the Internet / Stevo's Nobel Ideas. You can find me at http://forums.delphiforums.com/stevo1, on my Stevo's Novel Ideas Amazon Influencer page (https://www.amazon.com/shop/stevo4747) or search for me on Google for many more reviews and recommendations.

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 4 out of 5]

No general theme so the collection lacks continuity but the rhythm of these pieces and general mood leaps out at you, forcing you to wonder what all have you missed because you are not looking and listening correctly. Not afraid to punch at what/who he perceives is misguided.

[Peter B Waddell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The challenge of a child with autism evolves through guilt and frustration to learning and, ultimately, to pride and joy. Presented engagingly in accessible poetry that drew me in more deeply with my every return to read the book. Thanks MZ

[Momo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning, essential collection.

[mar · Rating 3 out of 5]

some really good ones but also a lot of meh political anxiety, you can tell it’s a 2016 book

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh. So much to like. Especially when you’re reading it in Berkeley.