Sun Bear
After the imaginative fever of Come on All You Ghosts (2010), Guggenheim fellow Zapruder tones things down in his wry fourth collection. He is ruminative and plain-spoken, forthright and hard-hitting, as in the title poem, in which he pays tribute to a zoo bear and expresses concern about our ability to destroy ourselves and every other living entity. Zapruder is attentive to “what we call news,” painfully aware that as he reads, people die. “I just sit in my room and worry.” Yet his humble attentiveness to the world and willingness to convey personal revelations; his open anxiety; tricky, needling humor; and brain-teasing syntax are oddly tonic and reassuring. His short-lined, constricted poems are ladder-like columns down which we tumble. He is riddling and insistent when it comes to accepting ambivalence and ambiguity.  Zapruder writes of a long-ago baseball game, radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, a fruit-fly invasion, “terrible governors,” a map of the world, contrariness, guilt, and love. And as he ponders the everyday conflation of the trivial and the profound, he refuses any easy out. --Donna Seaman