52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
03. Come on all you ghosts.
One of the NYT’s 100 best books of 2011. Except it’s 2010. Whatever. If I were to oversimplify I’d say most modern non-Language poetry I’ve read strikes me as either “Wide-eyed wonder at the amazingness of it all” or “Post-millennial confusion about being alive,” with a small slice of “I fucking hate everything, especially God.” Zapruder is there in the second category, again– as a simplification. This is better than most, employing an easy everyday voice to take you through not-so-everyday thought, mostly about life, some about poetry itself. Standouts include Minnesota, Paper toys, Global warming (“I have seen the new five-dollar bills / with their huge pink hypertrophied numbers / in the lower right hand corner and feel / excited and betrayed. / Which things should never change?”), and the title poem, which runs for pages and is about poetry and the interplay between the writer, the reader, and the dead. Found myself thinking what it’ll be like when (not if) I re-read this collection.
