The Pajamaist

"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.

Matthew Zapruder was born in 1967 and holds degrees from Amherst, Berkeley, and University of Massachusetts. His debut volume of poetry, American Linden, received the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. He is founder of Verse Press, lead guitarist for The Figments, and co-curator of the KGB Reading Series. He lives in New York City.