I Love Hearing Your Dreams - by Matthew Zapruder (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

From a poet whose "poems don't merely attempt beauty; they attain it" (Boston Review), 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.

Review Quotes

Praise for I Love Hearing Your Dreams

"Filled with the anguish of clinging to joy in a deeply troubled world. In a typically plaintive poem, he writes, "Today I just want to look / and think and be quiet / and figure out how / things I do can matter." On some level, that's what we all want. Zapruder expresses those desires we recognize but could never have articulated ourselves." --Washington Post

"So deeply pleasurable to read. This is the kind of reading that's a physical pleasure, a pleasure in the mind and in the way the language unfolds in the imagination of the senses." --McSweeney's

"Elegiac and ebullient . . . Zapruder delivers a work of remarkable wit and disciplined emotional attentiveness." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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"

"These poems capture the most mysterious quality of dreams: their mingling of absurdity and clarity that can sometimes reverberate into waking hours." --Alta Online

"It would be easy to overlook [Zapruder's] mastery of form, given the deceptive, tossed-off way in which form manifests, often in sequences of couplets or a single long stanza, lines invariably brief. Out of seeming paucity, Zapruder wreaks astounding effects. I found myself reading many poems twice, three times, believing at first each had partially eluded me, yet letting each subsequent reading settle in and realizing there was no true trickery at play, but rather meditation and method requiring patience." --Merion West

Praise for Matthew Zapruder

"Zapruder's poems don't merely attempt beauty; they attain it." --Boston Review

"Matthew Zapruder has a razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture." --The New York Times

"Zapruder's poems have a directness and verve that are reminiscent of Frank O'Hara; they're poems for everyone, everywhere, insisting that everything is subject for poetry, and that all language is poetic language, democratic in its insights and feelings." --NPR

"Zapruder's verse offers solace and an invaluable blueprint for empathy." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"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; Father's Day; Why Poetry; and Story of a Poem, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and I Love Hearing Your Dreams. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. His poetry has been adapted and performed by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider and Attacca Quartet at Carnegie Hall and San Francisco Performances 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. He was Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022, and from 2016 to 2017, he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the weekly Poetry Column for The New York Times Magazine. He lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at Saint Mary's College of California.