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

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.”