Spool

Matthew Cooperman Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize Free Verse Editions Edited by Jon Thompson Free Verse Editions Edited by Jon Thompson Information and Pricing 978-1-60235-744-0 (paperback, $14); 978-1-60235-745-7 (PDF, $9.99) © 2016 by Parlor Press. 120 pages. Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details. Reviews Cassandra Cleghorn, Sugar House Reviews (25 June 2017) Peter Burzynski, MAYDAY magazine 11 (2017). "Ghost Music or Plangency: The Organic Momentum of Matthew Cooperman's Spool" by Tyler Sheldon. Entropy. 20 June 2016. Praise for Matthew Cooperman's Spool "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 About the Author Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, with Marius Lehene (2013), as well as Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (2011), DaZE (2006), and A Sacrificial Zinc (2001), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. More information can be found at http://matthewcooperman.org/.