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...
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 -- ...
Articulating the search for a cohesive American identity, Matthew Cooperman's poetry attends to the slippery question of place: its history in personal and cultural memory and its tenuous constitution as family, nature, love, and community. Cooperman uses the metaphor of travel to invoke the necessary motion and distance required to look back at one's past.
Articulating the search for a cohesive American identity, Matthew Cooperman's poetry attends to the slippery question of place: its history in persona...