“Zapruder’s hip lyricism offers both the slippery comedy and a surprisingly grave, ultimately winning, commitment to real people, emotions, locales.”—Publishers Weekly


Matthew Zapruder is a young poet reinvigorating American letters. In his second collection he engages love, mortality, and life in New York City after 9/11. The title piece, a prose-poem synopsis of an unwritten novel, turns all literary forms upon themselves with savvy and flair, while the elegy cycle “Twenty Poems for Noelle” is a compassionate song for a suffering friend.


Noelle, somewhere in an apartment
symphony number two
listens to you breathing.
Broken glass in the street.
What was once unglowing glows. . .


The Pajamaist is an intimate book filled with sly wit and an ever-present, infectious openness to amazement. Zapruder’s poems are urbane and constantly, curiously searching.