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.”

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ISBN: 9781556592447

Format: Paperback

Canada

By Canada I have always been fascinated.
All that snow and acquiescing.
All that emptiness, all those butterflies
marshaled into an army of peace.
Moving north away from me
Canada has no border, away
like the state its northern border
withers into the skydome. In a world
full of mistrust and self-medication
I have always hated Canada.
It makes me feel like I’m shouting
at a child for letting a handful
of pine needles run through his fist.
Canada gets along with everyone
while I hang, a dark cloud
above the schoolyard. I know
we need war, all the skirmishes
to keep out borders where
we have placed them, all
the migration, all the difference.
Just like Canada the Dalai Lama
is now in Canada, and everyone
is fascinated. When they come
to visit me, no one ever leaves me
saying, the most touching thing
about him is he’s so human.
Or, I was really glad to hear
so many positive ideas regardless
of the consequences expressed.
Or I could drink a case of you.
No one has ever pedaled
every inch of thousands of roads
through me to raise awareness
for my struggle for autonomy.
I have pity but no respect for others,
which is not compassion, just ordinary
love based on attitudes toward myself.
I wonder how long I can endure.
In Canada the leaves are falling.
When they do each one rustles
maybe to the white-tailed deer
of sadness, and it’s clear
that whole country does not exist
to make me feel crappy
like a candelabra hanging
above the prison world,
condemned to freely glow.

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