In a recent essay titled “Don’t Paraphrase,’’ Zapruder makes clear his belief that poems “must be saying something that cannot be said in any other way’’ — that they are “not necessarily goal oriented’’ and that poems that function as code to be cracked for their “true message’’ are “all just one step up from a crossword puzzle.’’ Thus, “Come On All You Ghosts’’ is, throughout, a collection animated by its own making, with each poem working itself out on the page. It also contains some of the most arresting poems Zapruder has ever written — certain in their confidence and confident in their uncertainties.
From poem to poem, you can watch Zapruder’s lines unfurl as they go. In simpler times, his style might have been tagged “stream of consciousness,’’ but consciousness these days seems a lot more akin to a flooded delta, and Zapruder navigates his terrain with an impressive balance of honesty and intuition. His lines like to contradict and double back on themselves (his voice “pretends to be shy/ and actually is’’ in “Aglow’’), and they often writhe within the limits of language. Take these lines from the title poem: “I have lived in the black crater/ of feeling every moment/ is the moment just after/ one has chosen forever/ to live in the black crater/ of having chosen to live in the black crater.’’
More often than not, Zapruder’s poems make themselves worth following by simply rising to the responsibility of leading us into their respective unknowns, as in “Pocket’’: “. . .Today the unemployment rate/ is 9.4%. 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.’’
