The Pajamaist

　　Matthew Zapruder is a young poet reinvigorating American letters. In his second collection he engages love, mortality, and life in New York City after 9/11. The title piece, a prose-poem synopsis of an unwritten novel, turns all literary forms upon themselves with savvy and flair, while the elegy cycle "Twenty Poems for Noelle" is a compassionate song for a suffering friend.

　　Noelle, somewhere in an apartment

　　symphony number two

　　listens to you breathing.

　　Broken glass in the street.

　　What was once unglowing glows. . .

　　The Pajamaist is an intimate book filled with sly wit and an ever-present, infectious openness to amazement. Zapruder's poems are urbane and constantly, curiously searching.

　　In the fall of 2006, Zapruder will participate in the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour, an epic fifty-day reading tour of America that is being billed as the biggest literary event of 2006-certainly one to make and sustain buzz.

　　Matthew Zapruder was born in 1967 and holds degrees from Amherst, Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. His debut volume of poetry, American Linden, received the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize. He is founder of Verse Press (now Wave Books), lead guitarist for The Figments, and co-curator of the KGB Reading Series. He teaches at the New School MFA program and lives in New York City.