Poet Matthew Zapruder joins Alta Asks Live and host Heather Scott Partington on Wednesday, May 27 at 12:30 p.m. PST to discuss his latest collection, Father’s Day, the role of poetry in a time of global crisis, how he’s teaching college from his Oakland home, and much more.
Buy the book: Father’s Day
Read Alta Asks: Talking with Matthew Zapruder
Alta’s review of Father’s Day by Paul Wilner (excerpted)
“What dream was I born into / and what will happen / when the dreamer wakes,’’ Matthew Zapruder asks in his eloquent new collection, Father’s Day. It’s a cri de coeur about the times in which we live and the complex issues of patrimony, including the difficult emotions he and his wife had to confront after their son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.
Zapruder’s talents are already on display in four earlier poetry volumes, as well as in Why Poetry, a book-length argument against the obstacles that deter us from understanding and enjoying verse. Anyone familiar with his work—he’s the former poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine and an associate professor in the creative writing MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California—knows he’s not advocating an uncritical return to the style of, say, Robert Frost. Rather, he’s searching for hard-earned truths, expressed as carefully as such truths can be. —
Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day, from Copper Canyon in Fall 2019, as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose. He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations.
About the moderator
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is the winner of an emerging critic fellowship from the National Book Critics Circle and the critic in residence for UC Riverside’s Palm Desert MFA program. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books among other publications. She lives in Elk Grove, California, with her husband and two children.
