Late at night, one night, a man holds his daughter’s hand, a thing as normal, we’re told, as sauna-sweaty nudes in Finland walking their dogs. Except this man’s a poet, rejected, and wondering if he’s relevant, and the girl’s anaphylaxis makes her afraid she can’t breathe. And outside is outside, maybe. Maybe there’s a deadly plague rampant on Earth, maybe it’s Covid, maybe it’s whiteness, maybe it’s Nazis, neos, or racist post-shtetl grandmamas? Maybe it’s relevance? We don’t always know,maybe.Neither does Matthew Lippman know. But in the way only real poems know, that is, know how, these poems do know, have learned, that it’s never just about peanuts and editors, or flame, or relevance, or Nazis. It’s not. At times we wish it was—it’s that we’re here, and these poems know what it is to be here, and how, always “burning with not enough,” and “trying to feel something,” it comes down to how to “turn the neighborhood into a neighborhood.” We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On puts us in midst of all that happening, which is one thing happening, maybe, which is everything, which is the only thing happening.
—Ed Pavlić, Author of Call It in the Air
In a world “too much about the mind,” ideological differences, and social performance, Matthew Lippman has written a love ballad to our times that aims straight at the heart. He conjures the Romantic ideals—beauty, truth, goodness—in an absurdist contemporary idiom, with genuine feeling taking center stage, as a corrective and balm in a world where unity, togetherness, and intimacy have been lost. Traversing past and present and our costumed and nude selves, this collection invokes music, baseball, family, strangers, cities, and stories, turning zombies back into humans and “invent[ing] an algorithm to slow everything down.” A soundtrack to your formative memories and companion in your loneliest hour, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On recalls Sufism’s ecstasy and devotion to the beloved, singing beyond all divisions “there should always be love.”
—Virginia Konchan, Author of Bel Canto
Reading Matthew Lippman’s poetry is like being shaken out of a deep slumber to behold, sud- denly, 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, rac- ism, whiteness, performance art, baseball, New York City in the 80s, or pandemic suburbia, what Lippman is really writing about—always—is what it means to love.
—Nicole Graev Lipson, Pushcart Prize-Winning Author of Mother and Other Fictional Characters