Press for Matthew Lippman's "The New Year of Yellow"

From the Foreward by Tony Hoagland

"Different poets possess different powers. So Lippman has eros and humor; somehow, also, he has a great, unfalsifiable affection for human nature. But his work is also empowered by verbal gusto, a faith in the joy of saying. . . . Full of exuberance and invention, flush with the stuff of struggle in the world, bright colored with mood, The New Year of Yellow is a defense of human nature. I believe in its animal instinct, its god-sanctioned, oxygen-breathing, self-evident inalienable right to pronounce."

From Publishers Weekly

This lively and humorous prize-winning debut follows a cranky-but-secretly-exuberant persona as he "deeks and bops" through the inner-city experience in 34 light-hearted free verse poems. This forty-something protagonist passes his time pondering existential crises such as "What do you do in the mid-afternoon/ when all of your business has been taken care of / and there is only the nap?" or deciding "It is time for me to start making love to Joni Mitchell." Lippmann revels in the minutiae of life that most people don't pause to notice and, despite pretensions of haplessness, his speaker is very much a thinker. His mind lands on mock-serious problems such as "Everyone wants a monkey,/ I can't afford them," but he also has time to contemplate Diane Arbus' suicide and the way "Sometime at the end of the 1980s the Holocaust closed down for me." Contest judge and kindred poet Tony Hoagland's introduction suggests this book will make anyone laugh, but its real strength and surprise is in the occasional moments when Lippmann treats memory seriously and tenderly. "Where Are All the Puerto Ricans" concludes with the touching moment of desperation: "Where are you now, Pedro Gonzalez,/ Stand up, I can't find you." These moments suggest a greater range than Lippman initially displays.

From Corduroy Books

Lippman reflects the best components of contemporary American poetry. And by moving beyond the larger arguments that dominate too much of the dialogue surrounding today’s narrative poems (I’m thinking “Is this poetry?” or “This is just prose with a jagged margin!”), we can make room for more difficult dialogues—particularly those regarding content. And it is content (or, dare I say, heart?) that drives The New Year of Yellow, a search for meaning inside the dizzying motions of the day to day.

--Tim Lockridge

From The Yale Herald

The New Year of Yellow finds its greatest strength in the absolute pleasure Lippman takes in being alive. He is not a poet who sits at his desk with his head in his hands pondering at the heather and mist, but rather a poet who cartwheels through the streets in a kind of imitative ecstasy. He peoples his poems with those for whom he has great affection. Even when he is mocking them, it is good-natured and ultimately kind. In “Señor His Spatula,” he ends with that same helpless affirmation of life, proclaiming, “i don’t know anymore how any of us makes it through the day/in our everyday underwear/soiling the world and having it rise at the same moment/when I pick up the orange or Señor his spatula/just to hum a little song/a little ditty for ourselves knowing damn well/the earth gets us everytime and thank god.”

--Amy Lee

From Chronogram

Initially, Matthew Lippman’s debut poetry collection looks like loopy-lyrical-riffs on quotidiana: jazz, getting fat, blondes. It works. His generous humor makes it a good book. What makes it a great book is the way his hooks transport us to places unexpected, strange, sacred: “Everyone Wants a Monkey” could lounge in Friends sitcom territory; instead, the speaker morphs into a primate, “scratching my head with two fingers, / hanging on my tree with the other three.” Other poems are brave enough to move us, connect. “Apple Psalm” begins “What Mike had to say, / that God was a delicious apple in November, / is what his other side said, / that you must eat yourself.” In 16 lines, we voyage from Broadway to Columbia County, from ecstasy to elegy. Lippman, a New Yorker turned Claveracker, makes his New Year a prayer book all its own.

--Daniel Nester