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Open Books: Events
October 08, 2010 07:30 PM
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER
"I am standing / here exactly, covered in shame and lightning, / doing what I'm supposed to do," writes Matthew Zapruder in his third collection, Come on All You Ghosts ($16 Copper Canyon), a book that is equal parts wry humor, melancholy, and love. The conversational tone of his poems is an open door, an invitation to enter a place both deeply personal yet familiar, and often described in startlingly unusual ways -- "Sometimes / when I close my eyes // I hear a billion workers / in my skull / hammering nails from which // all the things I see / get hung." A sense of loss drifts like smoke through the book -- "Come on all you ghosts, / try to make me forget you," -- an acknowledgment of sadness's continual renewal. And just as present, if not more so, is a gentle, earnest affection, a gratitude for the
chance to love and be loved in myriad ways --
"I live on a hill where / the wind steals music from everything and brings it to me."
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