Come on All You Ghosts

Starred review from July 26, 2010
Zapruder's third collection of hip, quirkily haunting yet surprisingly earnest poems is his best and most beautiful. He spans the major genres—love poetry ("I admire/ and fear you, to me you are an abyss/ I cross towards you"), elegy ("I have been coasting,/ but from this forward Grace I vow/ I shall coast no more"), ode ("my friends ordered square burgers/ with mysterious holes leaking a delicious substance"), friendship tribute ("Dobby lives/ in Minnesota and seems basically happy"), to name a few—updating them for the 21st century. He even proves himself to be a charming nature poet: of a fox he says, "it held a grasshopper in its mouth,/ which it dropped when it saw the small carcass of a young javelina." These poems are still full of quick jump-cuts, seeming tangents, and almost adorable imagery, but all more focused on subject matter. In the spooky but also companionable titular long poem that closes the volume, Zapruder communes with an array of unseen presences, from the reader to the shades of his family and influences: "Come with me/ and I will show you/ terrible marvels.// The little cough I heard in my mind/ was one I remembered/ my father made just as he died."

August 1, 2010

As in his previous collection (The Pajamaist), Zapruder speaks "with a voice that pretends to be shy/ and actually is, always in search of the question/ that might make you ask me one in return." In his now signature, meandering style, he'll often begin with simple, even childlike observations ("Oh this Diet Coke is really good") that set off associative chains in search of subjects that resonate, psychologically or philosophically, with past personal experiences. A poem that begins, for example, with dishwashing triggers a meditation on childhood encounters with Ursulines. Seeming to discover themselves as they go, Zapruder's improvisations (or so they appear) enlist the reader as coexplorer, stumbling into candid self-revelations ("I am also/ always balancing/ on the smooth blade of not/ letting other people down") or surreal quips ("I feel like an elk getting a pelvic exam") with wide-eyed grace. Only when, as in the long title poem, the poet attempts a sustained elegiac or solemn tone do his energy and inventiveness flag. VERDICT Affably offbeat interiority is nothing new (think New York School), but Zapruder brings a charm and rhetorical skill that infuse this familiar poetic posture with new--and enjoyably readable--life.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2010
Zapruders poems are ordered by dream logic that melds the familiar with the mysterious. Yet as brain-teasing as his wonderfully strange yet exactly right imagery is, the formal elements of his poems are so liquid and magnetizing as to be invisible. A poet of both respect and resistance, Zapruder has a penchant for disarming opening lines, such as, I hate the phrase inner life, or, I like the word pocket. The latter launches a poem in which contemplation of a pockethow peculiar and gravid the word becomes with repetitionleads to a vision of a wrecked airplane at the bottom of the sea. Zapruder writes with compassion and bafflement about loneliness and the broadcasting of war and other catastrophes, and he remembers his dead with candor and tenderness. Zapruder also ponders the unnerving juxtapositions of our world of earbuds, sad crushed plastic, and giant particle colliders. Of abundance and impoverishment, relentless connectivity and isolation in plain sight. I am never / at ease. I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. I examine my feelings without feeling anything. And yet these are deeply felt, exciting, and caring poems, droll and wistful, obliquely affirming, phosphorescently beautiful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)