A Sacrificial Zinc impels the reader on a journey into the nature of place. Written out of a vanished suburban landscape, Matthew Cooperman’s book ― part navigational trope, part metaphor of embodiment ― enacts the complex weave of identity as a series of places, lovers, influences, and natural objects. The landscape itself is beautifully particularized as the desert and mountain spaces of the American West, and the flora and fauna of the Pacific Rim. From “the blue Pacific exactly the color of cold” to “the magnolia leaves [of California] / in the first scuttle of fall,” these lovely poems ground a journey in that “little better thing than earth.”

A Sacrificial Zinc: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Literature & Fiction

Cooperman, Matthew

Poetry

Pleiades Press

Articulating the search for a cohesive American identity, Matthew Cooperman’s poetry attends to the slippery question of place: its history in personal and cultural memory and its tenuous constitution as family, nature, love, and community. Cooperman uses the metaphor of travel to invoke the necessary motion and distance required to look back at one’s past.

Surge (Wick Chapbook Series 2)

The Kent State University Press

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Disability Studies. Parenting. Autism. Collaboration. Docu-poetics. "We think we know how our lives should be; we know how words fit together in a sentence. We use tests and benchmarks, charts and graphs, rules and spell-checks, to affirm these truths. Maya--the little girl at the center of this book--confounds such ways of knowing. Innominate, she inspires this book's form and sound, similarly unclassifiable. In NOS, Kaupang and Cooperman fight for a new grammar beyond the limits of standardized lines, to 'let loose the radiant / circle of her sentence.' It's a grammar we all need."--Jena Osman "In their compelling and moving collaboration, Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman chronicle the challenges and occasional triumphs of raising a child with autism. The three letters of the book's title, NOS, embody the reduction--the negation--of individuals and bodies to medical and psychoanalytic acronyms. The poets realize, however, that the designation of autism to describe their daughter is only a placeholder for a disorder 'Not Otherwise Specified,' one which impels them into the vagaries of evaluation, diagnosis, and intervention. Nor does the designation describe the affective challenges of dealing with behavioral anomalies, silences, screaming fits, sleeplessness and trauma. At its core, the work celebrates a child's life, however difficult, in passages that testify to the family's resilience. Its rich formal complexity combines lyrical testimony with documentary objectivity. NOS is a vital contribution to disability poetics but also to a critical poetics of embodiment. It is a remarkable book."--Michael Davidson "NOS is a book any parent of a child on the autism spectrum will recognize themselves in. In it are recorded our uncertainty, and our alienation, and our love, and our love, and our joy. But it is also art, primarily and always so, and often shines with a beauty that is painful to see and more painful to ignore--indeed, NOS does all that can be asked of art: it expands human understanding of humanity itself."--Shane McCrae

NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified)

Kaupang, Aby

Futurepoem Books

WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE | FREE VERSE EDITIONS, edited by JON THOMPSON | "SPOOL'S a year 'written in threes'-its three word lines forming narrow columns or perhaps threads. 'Thread' is a word Cooperman explicitly associates with the lyric here and it is also Ariadne's thread of rescue or at least return though, at times, 'the tape is/broken now so / sick and slck.' To change up the metaphor, as this poem does, SPOOL is a hive of words continuously active and also continuously threatened with a sort of colony collapse. Written in conversation with past greats such as Shakespeare, Milton, Hopkins, SPOOL is a way of inhabiting our present." -RAE ARMANTROUT | "Carefully wrought, these taut, concentrated poems move together on a fundamental level between limit and enlargement, impatience and watching, intention and play. Three words to the turn 'of increments serializing' pull out and wind back a  'current between you / and me rivers.' Cooperman's SPOOL is remarkable." -PAM REHM | "Cooperman spools his investigations of wild domesticity on 'parcels of sound,' 'peace bullets,' 'creaks on cricket / strings,' tumbrels tilted to shake free 'the bird O' of his daughter's throat. An animal in the material sunders as it lands thought in language, birds in words. 'Have you seen / your hands  in/ dreams?' The poems are concerned with things rare and daily, with 'beginning to see / and continuing to / see.' With how to mend and live more generously in care of things near, sewing what we rend. SPOOL learns its part in the evolutionary drama of species, rent beyond repair yet ongoing, even exuberant. The poem winds together opposites, as it tweets 'the vireo's here' and after. Intimate work from a master of the panorama, the landscapes here are inside words." -JONATHAN SKINNER | A former Provincetown Fellow, MATTHEW COOPERMAN is the author of, most recently, the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, w/Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), as well as Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press, 2011), DaZE (Salt Publishing Ltd., 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Four chapbooks exist in addition, including Little Spool, winner of the 2014 Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize. A founding editor of Quarter After Eight, and co-poetry editor of Colorado Review, Cooperman teaches at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children. More information can be found at www.matthewcooperman.com.

Spool

Parlor Press

The poems of Daze form a prospect on time-the passing of literal days, the ephemerality of the body, frangible memory, American speed, the crisis of late modernity. Daze charts out the periods of our belief, blending personally-lived experiences with wildly assimilative narratives which make up our blurred identities. Written as a series of series, Daze works out the demands of the diurnal by interlocking poems both discretely within sections and across sections. Challenging the moral entropy of the 21st century, Daze is as much a view of bewilderment and outrage as it is the beautiful or true expression of poetry.

Daze (Salt Modern Poets Series)

Salt Pub

BLACK AND WHITE EDITION  “A strangely beautiful mosaic...arresting.”  “Imago for the Fallen World is an elegy for the planet we're losing, a mosaic of soon-to-disappear human categories tenderly invested with Matthew Cooperman's own associations, his intricate world-knowing; he gets his ‘coordinates from the mother ship, which is the virus you.’ Cooperman's obsessive, strangely beautiful mosaic — punctuated by Marius Lehene's arresting images — is interrupted by several long laments, passionately sad and clear-eyed, that imagine us in the elsewhere where we'll soon not be: ‘a sense of self from space and the green hull caught on a sand bar…I am driving my shuttle into your core, you are gone you are gone you are gone you are gone… Here for now, I'm breathing more attentively.”’ —Catherine Wagner, author of Nervous Device, My New Job and Macular Hole  "As Satchel Paige once said, 'The social ramble ain't restful.' In Imago for the Fallen World, this social ramble is manifested via a collaborative artist book whose compositional strategies and experimental interface design are driven by covert poetry operations that disseminate the 'polyvocal unconsciousness' of network culture. Surf-sample-manipulate, collide and remix, #occupy and mashup - it's all good." —Mark Amerika, author of remixthebook  "What begins in darkness and ends in Los Angeles? What imposes categorical proximities that violently yoke together metonymical stand-ins for further categorization? In other words, what happens when Edward James Olmos, the World Health Organization, String Theory, Tarkovsky, and the Federal Reserve walk into a bar? Is this what the life of the mind’s eye looks like? The imago that emerges here is born from a collision of visual culture with that of clipped utterances, quotations, extended puns, exegetical quips, historical moments, literary monuments, and other bits of runoff from our daily social, political, economic and erotic lives. 'How do you pass the time?' Cooperman asks, before brilliantly offering the only answer we’ll ever need: 'It passes itself.'" —Noah Eli Gordon, author of The Year of the Rooster, The Source, and Novel Pictorial Noise

Imago for the Fallen World: poetry + images (Black & White Edition)

Jaded Ibis Press

Wonder About The

Middle Creek Publishing & Audio

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