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    Come on All You Ghosts
    Come on All You Ghosts
    Come on All You Ghosts
    Ebook133 pages1 hour

    Come on All You Ghosts

    By Matthew Zapruder

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    About this ebook

    "Charming, melancholy, hip."Publishers Weekly, starred review

    "Zapruder's innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. . . . Highly recommended."Library Journal

    Matthew Zapruder's third book mixes humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to "a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun." The title poem is an elegy for the heroes and mentors in the poet's lifefrom David Foster Wallace to the poet's father. Zapruder's poems are direct and surprising, and throughout the book he wrestles with the desire to do well, to make art, and to face the vast events of the day.

    Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate
    is 9.4 percent. I have no idea what that means. I tried
    to think about it harder for a while. Then
    tried standing in an actual stance of mystery
    and not knowing towards the world.
    Which is my job. As is staring at the back yard
    and for one second believing I am actually
    rising away from myself. Which is maybe
    what I have in common right now with you . . .

    Matthew Zapruder holds degrees from Amherst College, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of two previous books, including The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was honored by Library Journal with a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" listing. He lives in San Francisco and is an editor at Wave Books.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781619320604
    Come on All You Ghosts
    Author

    Matthew Zapruder

    Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, including Come on All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Father’s Day; Why Poetry; and Story of a Poem, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. His poetry has been adapted and performed by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider and Attacca Quartet at Carnegie Hall and San Francisco Performances and was the libretto for Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece by Missy Mazzoli commissioned for the Ecstatic Music Festival at Carnegie Hall. He was Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022, and from 2016 to 2017, he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the weekly Poetry Column for The New York Times Magazine. He lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

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    • 4/5
      Invigorating, often funny, often melancholy. The most zingy -- can I say, zingiest? - of contemporary poetry. I think his work may be love-it-or-hate-it. Here, at random, are the opening three lines from the poem "The Prelude" to help you decide: "Oh this Diet Coke is really good, / though come to think of it it tastes / like nothing plus the idea of chocolate".

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