“Clearly, there is something about poetry that rattles and mystifies people, that puts them off, that makes them feel as if there is something wrong,” writes Matthew Zapruder in Why Poetry, a book that seeks to change this sentiment. Conceived as a welcome mat to those who feel lost when presented with a poem, Why Poetry functions equally as a guide to understanding poetry, a call for the embrace of the genre, and a memoir of being transformed by it.
Zapruder, whose playful, often surprising poems have gained him a well-deserved following, is the ideal person to write a book like this—not simply because he’s a passionate and even-handed writer, but because as a teenager and young adult he was also confused by the why of poetry. It wasn’t until his mid-twenties that he fell under the spell of poetry’s possibilities, though, even then, he had to fight against the sense that his interpretation was somehow flawed.