Sunday Stack: I Love Hearing Your Dreams by Matthew Zapruder

A poetry collection merging themes of a nostalgic past into the now, of our nocturnal lives and ever-present ghosts.

Hope 2025 is off to a good start for you and your loved ones, my Substack friends. I’m attempting to revive one of my evergreen resolutions goals—to write more, here and elsewhere. I have a new job (one of the reasons my presence here has been rather limited during the past few months) and learning curves notwithstanding, this should, in theory, free up more bandwidth in the writing portion of my brain. So, given that my Sunday Stacks posts have been sporadic, at best, we’ll start with this one—some thoughts on my first book read in 2025—and see how it goes for the next 360 days.

There’s something I love about starting a new year with a book of poetry. I don’t know where this penchant of mine comes from, and I haven’t done this every year so it can’t be called a tradition or ritual. Maybe it has to do with wanting a comforting and gentle way of stepping into the unknown days ahead. (Methinks we will all need some comfort and gentleness in the unknown days ahead, yes?)

I’m in the midst of two reads (The Lemon Table by Julian Barnes and World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil), but put both temporarily aside today before heading out to the library, before the anticipated blizzard. There I found Matthew Zapruder’s newest poetry collection, I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024, 125 pgs).

I discovered Matthew Zapruder’s poetry several years ago when I was on the freelance book review circuit and received Why Poetry for consideration. That review never happened (sorry, Matthew) but I still own it. After reading I Love Hearing Your Dreams, I may need to revisit it.

NPR describes Zapruder’s work as "poems for everyone, everywhere, insisting that everything is subject for poetry, and that all language is poetic language, democratic in its insights and feelings.”

I agree. I Love Hearing Your Dreams is an enjoyable, approachable collection of poetry merging themes of a nostalgic past seamlessly into the now. There’s a grandmother's dictionary, the snow globes his father brought home for his mother from every business trip, a father soothing a feverish son, Zoom meetings during the pandemic. These are the people of our nocturnal lives, our ghosts ever so present. There are lines relatable to every writer—the scribbled thoughts in the middle of the night, the scrawl maddeningly indecipherable by day. There are various odes to poets who have left us, such as Gerald Stern.

"And you will never drive again
Along some river with too many
consonants in its name
it will keep flowing
north like the Nile...."

(Has to be Pittsburgh's own Monongahela, right? I mean, it has to be.)

And then there’s the title and that dreamlike cover, the latter of which "is from a book many of you read in childhood [The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes]" Zapruder writes on his Substack. Indeed, these poems feel dreamlike, the mood sometimes hazy like childhood memories. (“Your dreams/ have no hidden/ agenda to be wise/ they are made/ to be forgotten/ so something/ can be known…”)

Perhaps this is a theme that Zapruder has been thinking about for awhile. In March 2016, he was named the poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine. "For most of my life as a poet," Zapruder said in an interview, "I have been thinking about this very moment, when a poem enters into someone’s life. Most of the time, this happens in expected situations: a classroom, a wedding, a funeral. Maybe we have even chosen to pick up a book of them. But I believe that poems are meant to be a part of our lives. They are made up of our language, reconfigured and rearranged to make our minds move in different directions than they ordinarily would. At their best, they make something close to a waking dream."

The publisher's description, too: "'These are dream songs for an age of insomnia, where the poet is always awake “at that oddest hour / that does not end, / the crooked, unnumbered one” and the future seems to be “just the past in a suit / that will never be in style.' Yet dreams in Matthew Zapruder’s poems are also a place of possibility, of reality envisioned anew—sleep shows us not merely what the world is, but what it could be."

Don’t sleep on this one. Highly recommended, 4 out of 5 stars.