Dobby Gibson & Matthew Zapruder reading new poetry

celebrating the release of

Father’s Day – by Matthew Zapruder

from Copper Canyon Press

and

Little Glass Planet – by Dobby Gibson

from Graywolf Press

about Father’s Day:

The poems in Matthew Zapruder’s fifth collection ask, how can one be a good father, partner, and citizen in the early twenty-first century? Zapruder deftly improvises upon language and lyricism as he passionately engages with these questions during turbulent, uncertain times. Whether interrogating the personalities of the Supreme Court, watching a child grow off into a distance, or tweaking poetry critics and hipsters alike, Zapruder maintains a deeply generous sense of humor alongside a rich vein of love and moral urgency. The poems in Father’s Day harbor a radical belief in the power of wonder and awe to sustain the human project while guiding it forward.

about Little Glass Planet:

Little Glass Planet exults in the strangeness of the known and unknowable world. In poems set as far afield as Mumbai and Marfa, Texas, Gibson maps disparate landscapes, both terrestrial and subliminal, to reveal the drama of the quotidian. Aphoristic, allusive, and collaged, these poems mine our various human languages to help us understand what we might mean when we speak to each other—as lovers, as family, as strangers. Little Glass Planet uses lyric broadcast to foreshorten the perceived distances between us, opening borders and pointing toward a sense of collectivity. “This is my love letter to the world,” Gibson writes, “someone call us a sitter. / We’re going to be here a while.”

Elegiac, funny, and candid, Little Glass Planet is a kind of manual for paying attention to a world that is increasingly engineered to distract us from our own humanity. It’s a book that points toward hope, offering the possibilities of a “we” that only the open frequency of poetry can create, possibilities that are indistinguishable from love.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear, 2014, as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose, from Ecco Press/Harper Collins in August 2017. He cotranslated, with historian Radu Ioanid, Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s final collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems (Coffee House, 2008). He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, and others. In 2000, he co-founded Verse Press, and is now editor at large at Wave Book, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Dobby Gibson is the author of Little Glass Planet; Polar, which won the Alice James Award; Skirmish; and It Becomes You. His poetry has appeared in Fence, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. He lives in St. Paul.