A Sacrificial Zinc

A Sacrificial Zinc - Cover

Poems

by Matthew Cooperman

Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize Series, Pleiades Press

94 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations

Poetry

Paperback / 9780807127339 / November 2001

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.” 

Matthew Cooperman is also the author of Surge, winner of the 1999 Wick Chapbook Prize from Kent State University Press. He teaches writing at Cornell College in Iowa City, Iowa, and his poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, and Denver Quarterly.

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