Matthew Zapruder picks the poems for the 2022 edition of The Best American Poetry, "a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title" (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been "one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world" (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a selection of the year's most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work. For The Best American Poetry 2022 guest editor Matthew Zapruder, whose own poems are "for everyone, everywhere...democratic in [their] insights and feelings" (NPR), has selected the seventy-five new poems that represent American poetry today at its most dynamic. Chosen from print and online magazines, from the popular to the little-known, the selection is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series. The series and guest editors contribute valuable introductory essays that illuminate the current state of American poetry.

"Zapruder's poems don't merely attempt beauty; they attain it."--"The Boston Review"

"Matthew Zapruder has a razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture."--"The New York Times"

"With dynamic, logically complex sentences, Zapruder posits a world that is both extraordinary and refreshingly ordinary."--"BOMB"

Matthew Zapruder's poems begin in the faint inkling, in the bloom of thought, and then unfold into wide-reaching meditations on what it means to live in the contemporary moment, among plastic, statistics, and diet soda. Written in a direct, conversational style, the poems in "Sun Bear" display full-force why Zapruder is one of the most popular poets in America.

From "I Drink Bronze Light": "

Great American summer lakes
right now I am flying above you
through a rare cloudless transparent sky
back to the city where it is always
cold even in summer
the round hole I press my face against
shows only a blue expanse
with white sails below
speckled exactly the way
the Aegean would have been
three thousand years ago
if one could have seen it from above
maybe riding in the dark claw
of a god who didn't care. . . ."

Matthew Zapruder is a poet, translator, and editor at Wave Books. He is the author of three collections of poetry, and his book "The Pajamaist" won the William Carlos Williams Award. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many publications, including "BOMB," "Harvard Review," "Paris Review," the "New Yorker," "McSweeney's," and the "Believer." He lives in San Francisco, California.

Poetry. It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world--the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined--with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation and hope. AMERICAN LINDEN is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which--by means of language--move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world. "Matthew Zapruder is a dangerous poet; his poems implicate us in demonstrations of lift-off and escape velocity while also proving the calamity of gravity"--Dean Young.

From rough optimism to sharp criticism, fifty American poets present new work dissecting the current political climate in America. Wide-ranging writers bring their bold voices to this collection, including Eileen Myles, Matthew Rohrer, Rebecca Wolff, Terrance Hayes, Joe Wenderoth, and Tao Lin.

"Walking by Hope Street""Look at the landscape, "
"A lot of damage, no?"
"But we are here together, "
"And of needing me, here"
"The world needs me, "
"We are too alone."
"And what of our orange daylight, "
"Growing darker as the lamplit"
"Trees grow dark. There"
"Is not enough to say."
"But our hands, our gentle"
"Frozen hands sift through"
"Things like numbers out of breath."
"It will all be okay, I promise."
"Promise who? Promise the faded land."
--Noelle Kocot

"Literary Agency""Coretta Scott"
"King has died, the other"
"day. Dream"
"unrealized. Lost"
"and found, lost again, bathos"
"my motivation"
"my Elysian"
"dream. The place"
"inside"
"untutored, incorruptible, "
"without relation. That's"
"something to hold onto, "
"and uncontingency"
"dressing the wound. That's"
"sad and just "what it is.""
"It is what it is."
"That's what I say"
"when I can't bear the news."
--Rebecca Wolff

"Charming, melancholy, hip."--"Publishers Weekly," starred review

"Zapruder's innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. . . . Highly recommended."--"Library Journal"

Matthew Zapruder's third book mixes humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to "a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun." The title poem is an elegy for the heroes and mentors in the poet's life--from David Foster Wallace to the poet's father. Zapruder's poems are direct and surprising, and throughout the book he wrestles with the desire to do well, to make art, and to face the vast events of the day.

"Look out scientists Today the unemployment rate
is 9.4 percent. I have no idea what that means. I tried
to think about it harder for a while. Then
tried standing in an actual stance of mystery
and not knowing towards the world.
Which is my job. As is staring at the back yard
and for one second believing I am actually
rising away from myself. Which is maybe
what I have in common right now with you . . . "

Matthew Zapruder holds degrees from Amherst College, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of two previous books, including "The Pajamaist," which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was honored by "Library Journal" with a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" listing. He lives in San Francisco and is an editor at Wave Books.