I Love Hearing Your Dreams Poems

From one of contemporary poetry’s most playful and original minds, an enchanting and harrowing journey through the landscape of dreams and twenty-first century hopes and disillusions.

“Your dreams
have no hidden
agenda to be wise
they are made
to be forgotten
so something
can be known”

I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a book of reveries, of failed elegies, of “the last time that things were real” and the moments that come afterward. These are dream songs for an age of insomnia, where the poet is always awake “at that oddest hour / that does not end, / the crooked, unnumbered one” and the future seems to be “just the past in a suit / that will never be in style.” Yet dreams in Matthew Zapruder’s poems are also a place of possibility, of reality envisioned anew—sleep shows us not merely what the world is, but what it could be.

From a poet celebrated for his “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture” (The New York Times), I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a startlingly beautiful and deeply vulnerable book where lives journey into a mystifying place and emerge transformed.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Father’s Day, as well as Why Poetry and Story of a Poem. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. Zapruder has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. In 2000, he co-founded Verse Press, and is now editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. His poetry has been adapted and performed by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider, and was the libretto for Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece by Missy Mazzoli commissioned for the Ecstatic Music Festival at Carnegie Hall. From 2016-17 he held the annually rotating position of  Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine and Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022.