The fourth collection from the celebrated American poet and editor, Matthew Zapruder.

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 the author of four collections of poetry: American Linden, Come on All You Ghosts, Sun Bear, and The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including, Paris Review, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and McSweeney’s, The Believer. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Oakland, where he is an editor at Wave Books and a member of the Core Faculty at the MFA in creative writing at St. Mary’s College of California.

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