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A review by brice_mo
I Love Hearing Your Dreams by Matthew Zapruder
3.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC!
Matthew Zapruder’s I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a warm, insulated collection of poems, often feeling like a shield between the reader and the world.
Many of these poems feel like the parts of bedtime stories that gnaw at the edges of dreams—the final sentences one hears before falling asleep. In other words, the cover offers a great picture of what readers can expect. These pieces surround readers like a blanket, muting the chaos of life when it occasionally breaks in.
Even the pieces with titles like “Supreme Despair Song” carry a certain kind of quietude. In that particular case, it’s immediately followed by a poem about yogurt. It’s so common for poetic turns to feel like a twist of the knife—it’s a nice alternative to see some that feel like rolling over in bed.
Unfortunately, the velvet-lined dreamscape Zapruder weaves here is often so smooth as to be frictionless. Many of the poems land the same way it does when someone shares a dream over breakfast—“Hm, I wonder if that means anything”—a momentary interruption before thinking about the day ahead or the toast that’s burning or almost anything else. Furthermore, some of these pieces seem to have been written during the height of the COVID pandemic, such as “The Evening Meeting,” and poems about Zoom calls feel like unpleasant relics at this point.
Thankfully, the collection ends strong. “Failed Elegy” is one of the most gorgeous poems I’ve read in a while, and it acts as an argument for the form’s limitations, suggesting that there are better places to be than the heart of a poem. It is such a succinct picture of the book’s guiding principle, and I wish it were one of the first pieces in the book so that it would frame everything else accordingly.
All in all, I Love Hearing Your Dreams feels like the perfect book to spend an afternoon and a cup of tea with, and I think it will reward readers who seek the comfort of poems that create room for them.
Matthew Zapruder’s I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a warm, insulated collection of poems, often feeling like a shield between the reader and the world.
Many of these poems feel like the parts of bedtime stories that gnaw at the edges of dreams—the final sentences one hears before falling asleep. In other words, the cover offers a great picture of what readers can expect. These pieces surround readers like a blanket, muting the chaos of life when it occasionally breaks in.
Even the pieces with titles like “Supreme Despair Song” carry a certain kind of quietude. In that particular case, it’s immediately followed by a poem about yogurt. It’s so common for poetic turns to feel like a twist of the knife—it’s a nice alternative to see some that feel like rolling over in bed.
Unfortunately, the velvet-lined dreamscape Zapruder weaves here is often so smooth as to be frictionless. Many of the poems land the same way it does when someone shares a dream over breakfast—“Hm, I wonder if that means anything”—a momentary interruption before thinking about the day ahead or the toast that’s burning or almost anything else. Furthermore, some of these pieces seem to have been written during the height of the COVID pandemic, such as “The Evening Meeting,” and poems about Zoom calls feel like unpleasant relics at this point.
Thankfully, the collection ends strong. “Failed Elegy” is one of the most gorgeous poems I’ve read in a while, and it acts as an argument for the form’s limitations, suggesting that there are better places to be than the heart of a poem. It is such a succinct picture of the book’s guiding principle, and I wish it were one of the first pieces in the book so that it would frame everything else accordingly.
All in all, I Love Hearing Your Dreams feels like the perfect book to spend an afternoon and a cup of tea with, and I think it will reward readers who seek the comfort of poems that create room for them.