The Pajamaist

Matthew Zapruder

The Pajamaist, Matthew Zapruder’s second collection of poetry, establishes Zapruder as one of the country’s most inventive young poets. The title poem imagines a novel in which human suffering is alleviated by transferring it to a professional sufferer: the Pajamaist, whom Zapruder describes as “an unemployed white whale in his mid-thirties. I mean male.” With characteristic humor and incisive wit, Zapruder interrogates our modern consciousness in an investigation into how we identify and confront social problems. “One can easily see,” he writes, “how observing the throes of the Pajamaist must render in the watcher new suffering, and fail to reduce anything.”

ISBN: 9781556592447

Format: Paperback

About the Author

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in Marfa, TX. His poetry has been adapted and performed at Carnegie …

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Reviews

“Charming, melancholy, hip and at times hopeful, the 21 poems in Zapruder’s second collection take on personal subjects and meditate on life in cities and towns, friendship, love and the nature of poetry itself.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This collection is smart, ambitious and—for the most part—full of poems that speak to us and make us think.” —BOMB, Editors’ Choice

“Zapruder’s innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. A roller coaster of a read, this is highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“Like the light in the closet, Zapruder’s poems illuminate familiar, unassuming, inconspicuous subjects… What he brings to light comes with its own hidden thoughts that inspire him to reach further into the dark… These poems glow with understanding.” —Small Spiral Notebook

“[Zapruder’s] subjects are, arguably, the eternal elements of poetry, but the way he addresses them is refreshingly modern… Zapruder’s poems don’t merely attempt beauty, they attain it.” —Boston Review

“Zapruder has not just a deft manner, but an inwardness which is sturdy and generous, a little reminiscent of the James Wright of quite a different era.” —Tony Hoagland, Ploughshares