I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems
By Matthew Zapruder
Scribner, September 24, 2024
From one of contemporary poetry’s most playful and original minds, an enchanting and harrowing journey through the landscape of dreams and twenty-first century hopes and disillusions.
“Your dreams
have no hidden
agenda to be wise
they are made
to be forgotten
so something
can be known”
I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a book of reveries, of failed elegies, of “the last time that things were real” and the moments that come afterward. These are dream songs for an age of insomnia, where the poet is always awake “at that oddest hour / that does not end, / the crooked, unnumbered one” and the future seems to be “just the past in a suit / that will never be in style.” Yet dreams in Matthew Zapruder’s poems are also a place of possibility, of reality envisioned anew—sleep shows us not merely what the world is, but what it could be.
From a poet celebrated for his “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture” (The New York Times), I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a startlingly beautiful and deeply vulnerable book where lives journey into a mystifying place and emerge transformed.
Praise for I Love Hearing Your Dreams
“These poems are irresistibly original; they feel as strange and true as life itself.”
—Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“Have you ever held a book, but knew secretly you were holding a mountain? Or maybe your heart felt like the future galloping in your chest after reading a passage so visceral and full of magic, or so faithfully human it was like you wanted all the words in the world to go home and to leave these poems forever ringing in your ear? That was me when I first encountered I Love Hearing Your Dreams, a startling book, a resuscitating vision.”
—Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle and host of “The Slowdown”
Praise for Matthew Zapruder
“Matthew Zapruder has a razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture.” —The New York Times
“Zapruder’s poems don’t merely attempt beauty; they attain it.” —Boston Review
“Firmly situated in its (and our) political moment, and anchored by a compelling gravity and urgency… [Father’s Day] makes clear that there is a great deal at stake.”
—Washington Post
“Zapruder’s verse offers solace and an invaluable blueprint for empathy.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“One of our funniest, most technically virtuous poets enters an intimate, new stage of work in his moving fifth collection.” —Lit Hub
“A profoundly heartfelt and thoughtful book for all readers.” —Library Journal
“It’s the reach, the attention to daily life and the dream world we simultaneously inhabit, that gives Zapruder’s work its distinctive force.” —Alta Magazine
About the Author
Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Father’s Day, as well as Why Poetry and Story of a Poem. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. Zapruder has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. In 2000, he co-founded Verse Press, and he is now editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. His poetry has been adapted and performed by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider, and was the libretto for “Vespers for a New Dark Age,” a piece by Missy Mazzoli commissioned for the Ecstatic Music Festival at Carnegie Hall. From 2016–17 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for The New York Times Magazine, and he served as Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022.
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