In his sixth book of poems, Alan Shapiro once again shows that he is a master at articulating the secrets of the heart. The Dead Alive and Busy deals with issues of personal identity as revealed through examining the intimate bonds of family life. The poems explore these familial relations in terms of the religious, social, and literary contexts that inform them, delving into such universal themes as human frailty, illness and death, bereavement, and thwarted desires. By turns lyrical and narrative, slangy and elevated, analytical and visionary, this collection showcases one of America's most important poets in his top form. Praise for Alan Shapiro: "Shapiro is a shrewd and sympathetic moralist. He never trivializes his subjects with high-minded flourishes or stylistic gimmicks."—J. D. McClatchy, New York Times Book Review
Reel to Reel, Alan Shapiro’s twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not only the human realm of politics and culture but also the natural world, and even the outer spaces of the cosmos itself. In language richly nuanced yet accessible, these poems inhabit and explore fundamental questions of existence, such as time, mortality, consciousness, and matter. How did we get here? Why is there something rather than nothing? How do we live fully and lovingly as conscious creatures in an unconscious universe with no ultimate purpose or destination beyond returning to the abyss that spawned us? Shapiro brings his humor, imaginative intensity, characteristic syntactical energy, and generous heart to bear on these ultimate mysteries. In ways few poets have done, he writes from a premodern, primal sense of wonder about our postmodern world.
Chronicling the final four weeks of his sister Beth's life, as she dies in a hospice from breast cancer, Shapiro reveals fragments of the personal history of the family members who come to visit her, bringing to life a troubled and poignant past.
In this book from award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, the poet, in many ways, is coming to terms not only with his own mortality but also with the finite nature inherent in all human existence. Like the universe, it is full of strange, dark matter in its unflinching look at the unmaking of the self facilitated by our growing reliance on dehumanizing technology, something to which we can all attest in our viral-inflected era of remote living and working, and with so much of our energies focused on screens and keyboards. So much of what we are is being dumped into databases, into collective technological, medical, religious, political, and commercial languages, yet the poet continues to remind us of what's behind all of these technologies: humanity in all its frailties and virtues. Shapiro continues to evolve formally as a poet, as evidenced by the wide variety of prose poems, traditional lyrics, and experimental forms in this book, and although his abiding themes--family, human connection, and relationships--seem to come under a kind of assault in Proceed to Check Out, yet he continues to find the worth and vitality of the human endeavor and the pursuit of art. He remains committed to facing the hypocrisies and denials we'd much prefer to hide, and to exploring the social and psychological ties that bind all of us together in fully lived experience"--
The coherence Shapiro prizes is both more thorough and more thoroughgoing than that offered by a moralizing intelligence. His poetry comes by its sad wisdom through its accomodations to human happenstance and estrangement. . . .In Covenant, sympathy grounds itself in worldly particulars, and subjectivity begets responsibilities. Hardnosed yet tenderly attentive, Shapiro's acute self-consciousness distills an exacting conscientiousness."—David Barber, Poetry "At forty-years-old and already the author of four superbly written books of poems, Shapiro has produced a work of such authority and originality that he has permanently enlarged my hopes and expectations for contemporary poetry. His risk-loving swiftness of perception and his affinity for stories that up-end convention and taboo have enabled him to reclaim, for poets of my generation, areas of feeling and linguistic virtuosity that originated with William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, J. V. Cunningham, and Ivor Winters. It is hard for me to see how an ideal anthologist of the future will be able to include their names without gratefully including his."—Tom Sleigh, Boston Phoenix
As a little girl growing up in Boston, Miriam Bluestein fantasized about a life lived on stage, specifically in a musical. Get married, have a family—sure, maybe she’d do those things, too, but first and foremost there was her career. As a woman, she is both tormented and consoled by those dreams in her day-to-day existence with her family, including a short-tempered husband, a cranky mother, and three demanding children, one of whom, Ethan, shows real talent for the stage. It is through Ethan that Miriam strives to realize her dreams. As she pushes him to make the most of his talent, the rest of her life gradually comes undone, with her husband becoming increasingly frustrated and her other two children—Sam, a mass of quirks and idiosyncrasies, and Julie, hostile and bitter—withdrawing into their own worlds. Still Miriam dreams, praying for that big finale, which, when it comes, is nothing that she ever could have imagined. Broadway Baby marks the fiction debut of a nationally acclaimed award-winning memoirist and poet, “an acute observer of moments, people, art and language [who] packs even seemingly simple stories with many layers of meaning” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
We often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation—not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language—where “the signs loosen, fray, and drift”—Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn’t yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking “girly”; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss—moving against the current in the direction of the utterly ineffable.
“In deft, quiet language,” the Pulitzer Prize finalist “recalls the past and how it sometimes hurts” in his latest poetry collection (Library Journal). Alan Shapiro’s newest book of poetry explores the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social—both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.
In this, his first book, Alan Shapiro vividly recreates some of the more memorable and poignant moments from his Jewish-American childhood, and in the process reveals his compassionate interest in the forgotten, the alienated, and the infirm. The Courtesy is an intelligent, reflective examination of the poet's own psychological history. "The Courtesy is really an admirable book: it shows up the unreality of a lot of the other poetry one reads, dealing honestly and with that perversity which is a sign of thoughfulness, with the slight but heavy matter of our everyday defeats."—Michael Hoffman, Poetry Nation Review
A collection of essays on the situation of poetry in contemporary American culture, from Shapiro's multiple perspectives as poet (four volumes), teacher of poetry (U. of North Carolina, Greensboro), and reader. A TriQuarterly book. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The poems in Old war, Shapiro's ninth and most innovative collection, were written under the double aspect of love and fear, of hope that comes with any fresh start and the sense that history will evenutally undo or destroy whatever we struggle to make. -- Jacket flap.
A nominee for the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, this new collection contains poems that use their calm surfaces to restrain difficult and unshapely material. The longer poems, narratives of considerable power, display a generosity of detail and insight and seem more like versified short stories than poems. The character studies like "Extra," "Anatomy Lesson," and the title poem recall the bitterness in similar poems by Randall Jarrell or Anthony Hecht. The chilling poem "Neighbors" tells the story of a young couple, whose downstairs neighbor, a crone who sings old love songs, becomes a crazed menace.
AFTER THE DIGGING provides an exceptional look at the early work of acclaimed poet Alan Shapiro. His first collection of poems reveals his strong sense of historical narrative. The book is divided into two parts: a sequence on the Irish Famine in the mid-19th century and a series on demonic possession in late 17th-century New England.
A coming-of-age story of an American Jew and aspiring writer in the '60s and '70s. In this memoir in six movements, Alan Shapiro recalls how poetry helped him make sense of his own and other people's lives.
Jim Carlson’s most vivid memories of childhood are of his estranged father’s obsession with parring the Savage. Located on the island of Caramus, the 458-yard, par 4, 16th hole at Wild Links has presumably never been parred. At age twenty-five, Jim sets off to Caramus. Over the course of this golfing weekend, his life is forever transformed. There is the beautiful Tina, who presents Jim with a challenge to rival his own dream of parring the Savage. And there is John; a handsome, solidly built enigma of a young man who can knock the cover off a golf ball and plans to make his own run at the Savage—by using a gold ball, a 9-iron, and a little bit of magic. Nine-Iron John is a tale about reconciling a painful past with the hope for the future. It’s about fathers and sons, the fertile territory of the male ego, about coming to terms with the pursuit of athletic and sexual conquests. It’s about the search for dignity and self-respect, the desire to love and to be loved. It is the story of the journey that all men begin… that only a select few ever manage to successfully complete.
Psychologist Alan Shapiro explores in this book the relationship between a golfer's personality and his or her performance on the links, and shows how increased self-awareness can improve one's golf score.
This book proposes an important new paradigm for understanding biological evolution. Shapiro demonstrates why traditional views of evolution are inadequate to explain the latest evidence, and presents an alternative. His information- and systems-based approach integrates advances in symbiogenesis, epigenetics, and saltationism, and points toward an emerging synthesis of physical, information, and biological sciences.
This phrase, heard countless times every day in American courtrooms across the country, sets forth the burden of proof placed upon the prosecution in a criminal trial. Yet this cherished principle is not mentioned in the Constitution, nor is it defined by any laws. What, then, does “beyond a reasonable doubt” really mean, and how should it be interpreted and applied? In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt more than 80 distinguished contributors reflect on what this standard really means and how it is applied. Brilliantly dissecting its meaning from every angle, attorneys, judges, novelists, journalists, religious leaders and convicted felons shine a light on the most compelling standard in our legal system.
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