I Love Hearing Your Dreams

Starred review from July 15, 2024
This elegiac and ebullient collection from Zapruder (Father’s Day) weaves through several forms of heartache and loss. “I keep learning if you don’t write it down/ the thought just flies away,” he writes, intent on fixing the materials of dreams, memories, and other disappearing phenomena to the page. The feelings and needs of others are central (“at last the museum/ has become/ a museum of empathy”), as these poems look backwards, almost against their will, recognizing that “life is elsewhere and the past/ always misremembered,” as it’s painted diligently in “the perfect color/ for disappearing/ at night into the deep/ park.” “All solutions are suboptimal” faced with the dilemma of revisiting difficult losses and fleeting joys, but relief, Zapruder suggests, is equally to be found in what was always innately impermanent: “none of us could stop/ laughing at ourselves which in those/ holy wasted days was everything.” These pages are rich with elegies for friends, loved ones, and strangers, but even these are self-conscious about the bind of time and the desire to seek a do-over: “what would/ a perfect elegy do? place the flowers// back in the ground?” Zapruder delivers a work of remarkable wit and disciplined emotional attentiveness.