Sun Bear

Zapruder’s poems don’t merely attempt beauty; they attain it. -The Boston Review

Matthew Zapruder has a razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture. -The New York Times

With dynamic, logically complex sentences, Zapruder posits a world that is both extraordinary and refreshingly ordinary. -BOMB

Matthew Zapruder’s poems begin in the faint inkling, in the bloom of thought, and then unfold into wide-reaching meditations on what it means to live in the contemporary moment, among plastic, statistics, and diet soda. Written in a direct, conversational style, the poems in Sun Bear display full-force why Zapruder is one of the most popular poets in America.

From I Drink Bronze Light :

Great American summer lakes right now I am flying above you through a rare cloudless transparent sky back to the city where it is always cold even in summer the round hole I press my face against shows only a blue expanse with white sails below speckled exactly the way the Aegean would have been three thousand years ago if one could have seen it from above maybe riding in the dark claw of a god who didn’t care… .

Matthew Zapruder is a poet, translator, and editor at Wave Books. He is the author of three collections of poetry, and his book The Pajamaist won the William Carlos Williams Award. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many publications, including BOMB, Harvard Review, Paris Review, the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and the Believer. He lives in San Francisco, California.