It’s easy to be misled by the statement of poetics that comes early in American Linden, Matthew Zapruder’s first book: "The world is good for my pleasure and consumption. / I admire it totally, it stands / like a mountain inside and outside me." The sheen of irony Zapruder lays over these lines–the sad American trope of smug consumption, the flippant intensifier–nearly overwhelms their wry and telling self-analysis. Appearances aside, the lines are most accurately read as indicators of the generous anthropomorphism and gentle fabulation that Zapruder will deploy throughout the book. Rather than trapping readers inside his personality or grimly skewering contemporary culture, his approach attempts to give everything, from food to buildings to abstractions, a sympathetic hearing. The effect is as charming and unexpected as the rabbit-cum-Easter bunny that becomes the book’s totemic animal.
           Zapruder’s sympathies are often expressed in the language of romance, no matter what or whom they address, which allows his second-person poems to open outwards, encompassing not just the ostensible "you" but all that’s unknowable or just out of reach. "I vow I will touch you, / always more distant stranger," ends "Sweet Jesus," and the speaker of "Tiburon" is "dreaming of union" with a eucalyptus tree. Such effusions of love and personification might appear unconscious, but Zapruder has clearly deliberated on the appropriate stance for a poet in relation to the world. In "I Am A Sculptor," a sculptor who refuses to chisel his stone describes what his non-sculpture works against: he has not "relented only to see / the white lips of my past," or in anger "placed a spotlight behind / one particular thought / I mangled and forced," or "repented and wished to repair a wound / I choose to believe I have made." Dismissed, in the space of one long sentence, are poets dedicated to creating merely personal, political, theoretical, or apologist work. The poem begins with an image of the sculptor growing more and more like his unshaped stone and ends with a command that the poet disobeys: "go out and wander and leave / untouched all the things / we could ever love." As artistic dictates go, the ones presented in "I Am A Sculptor" are damning–and, of course, ultimately untenable, since the poem exists. Zapruder’s struggle with quiddity arises perhaps because, like the sculptor, he has the feeling that what artists handle can be damaged. Great tenderness and great reluctance are demanded of the artist; and even then, Zapruder seems to say, art may be doomed to diminish its material.
            Art will fall short, and people will, too. In part, the book’s generosity is grounded in "the question of fate," not whether it exists, which the poems accept a priori, but how to live with its existence. Since events are fated, forgiveness and acceptance are the only sane responses to guilt, failure, and tragedy itself. In "Coda," readers learn early that a group of musicians meeting in secret will be betrayed by a companion. While the musicians remain ignorant, the poem’s readers are complicit, aware that the apparent calm is false. The poem ends as the musicians are about to be arrested, but its last lines are given over to words a woman sings as the police enter: "the fists which are now / pounding on our door // are also a kind of music." The singer wielding her voice like "a master of swords" and, by extension, Zapruder himself are those who play while the ship goes down. Complicated by the readers’ foreknowledge of betrayal, the singer both evokes a familiar image and argues for the creation of beauty during disaster as the essential artistic mode.
           In "Whoever You Are," the poet addresses a long string of metaphors toward whomever it is, God or fate or something unnamed, that allows such disaster. Most of the poem is a study in trust and the helplessness predicated by belief:

As [. . .] the rescuers turning and floating believe
in their tethers and all those uninspected latches,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

as the mountain believed it could stay hollow
long enough to return the tunnellers home,
and their wives believed in trying to believe
that rumble through the clear skies was thunder
I believe that is not what you wanted[.]

The vehicle of the metaphor (the list of instances of belief) informs the tenor ("I believe that is not what you wanted") in more ways than likeness: though the speaker’s belief is directly compared to the metaphorical instances of belief, "that" also refers back to the instances as real events. One senses that the being who can reward belief with tragedy may in fact reward belief in its ultimate beneficence with even more tragedy. Zapruder ends the poem with a moment of mysticism followed by a paradox: "you will allow me to step I believe / into the mechanism / and tear off your wings." As an image of derailing fate, this is one oddly rooted in faith and a fate that acquiesces in its own destruction. Hinged on the book’s characteristic sympathy and hesitancy, the image recalls the Buddhist commonplace that reaching enlightenment requires killing the Buddha, getting rid of the otherness of the divine.
           For the most part, these are sad poems–"grief" and "grieving" reoccur over and over–but Zapruder has a light touch. The poems are never depressing; they never overwhelm. This is due in part to Zapruder’s spare prosody, which is marked by a deceptively simple diction, syntax-driven line breaks, and a conversational (but not prosaic) pace. The lightness comes, too, from a willingness to take nimble shots at emotional Goliaths, in the manner of Dean Young or Mary Ruefle. "I’m plagued / by the demons of loneliness," recounts the speaker of "School Street," who lives in cursed house. The demons, however, "are being punished, too. // One of them even said, ‘Like you / we are affected // by the cold the noise / and the wretched ceilings, / but the worst // is your endless complaining.’" When two meter-readers die in the house’s basement, an archangel is dispatched. Rather than reading the meter or dealing with the demons, the archangel moves in next door and stays inside practicing sign language and "staring into his world." It’s a funny, painful dead-end, a miracle that fizzles.
           American Linden is as much a love letter to the ordinary world as to an indifferent heaven. In the title poem, potatoes "cringe and bury their heads" as bodies fall from the sky. The speaker’s primary concern is not with the bodies, which stand up unharmed, but the potatoes. "Do you see them?" he asks.

Like you they were not born with pride,
they were born with skins made of earth.

Their eyes are black, and they sing out of tune,
quietly, under the snow.

The scene is strange, the message more familiar. Zapruder’s fables announce that inside the strictures of fate, all things that exist move in sympathy with one other. Being is a kind of desire declared in the language of presence, and, as such, all existence loves, grieves, and is filled with "doubt’s breath." The lesson is in how to Thou the world, how to "admire it totally."