Matthew Lippman
Poetry collections include:
We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, The New Year of Yellow, Monkey Bars, and others.
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Explore all of Matthew Lippman's works.
The joy of reading Lippman is that his poems embody the sorrow and hope of country music if country music was Lorca-like. “Someone Will Love You Many Times” is a giddy list of all the ways you could be loved and by whom, such as “Over and over and many times love will come at you / from a rooftop with billowy sheets / and Miley Cyrus will love you / and so will Spiro Agnew.” You just have to smile through this poem where you will be loved “from pockets and sandwiches…” You can’t read this without feeling that you are loved by someone, by everyone, even by you.
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
Empty Mirror
Reviews
I may walk away from reading a Lippman poem shaking my head from its swoops and turns, but I never walk away with questions about what I just read. He’s a poet who doesn’t actively think about craft. I don’t think he even revises. He does, however, write a TON. It would be fair to say that he thinks about the world in poems and has honed his own craft by intense practice and repetition. He’s built huge muscles of imagination and love for the reader.
Kerrin McCadden
Author of American Wake
Reading Matthew Lippman’s poetry is like being shaken out of a deep slumber to behold, suddenly, a glimmer of possibility under every surface. Daring, urgent, and suffused with longing, this collection cracks through the walls that keep us strangers to ourselves and one another, seizing on to what is most true and vital about being human. Whether writing about fatherhood, music, racism, whiteness, performance art, baseball, New York City in the 80’s or pandemic suburbia, what Lippman is really writing about—always—is what it means to love.
Nicole Graev Lipson
Pushcart Prize-winning author of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters