Full Description
Award-winning poet Alan Shapiro offers a new collection of poems reflecting on mortality and finitude.
Alan Shapiro's fourteenth collection of poetry, Proceed to Check Out, is a kind of summing up, or stock-taking, by an aging poet, of his precarious place in a world dominated by the ever-accelerating pace of technological innovation, political disruption, personal loss, and racial strife. These poems take on fundamental subjects-like the nature of time and consciousness and how or why we become who we are-but Shapiro presses them into becoming urgent and timely.
Employing idiomatic range and formal variety, Shapiro's poems move through recurring dreams, the coercions of childhood, and the mysterious connections of mind and matter, pleasure and memory. They meet an abiding need to find empathy and understanding in even the most challenging places-amid disaffection, public discord, and estrangement. His grasp of contemporary life-in all its insidious violence and beauty-is distinct, comprehensive, and profound.
Contents
Acknowledgments
ONE
Holding Cell
Zoom
Reunion in Heaven
The Periodic Table
Space Blanket
The Great Closer
Uncle Hy
Pumice
Sugar Shack
Money
TWO
Recurring Dreams
THREE
The Net
Wedding Tent
Divorce Party Bonfire
Ding Dong, the Bells Are Gonna Chime
What the End Was Like
Opportunity
Indifference
From the Hallway
Animal Crackers
An Arrangement
Backward
Now I Lay Me
FOUR
Letters
Holocene
At the Museum of Life and Science
Ten Statements of Not Knowing
Art According to Curly
Ten Thoughts on Trauma and Catharsis
Pastime
Hazel
Gravity and Grace
Hole in One
Tree on Mountain
The Old Age of Oliver
Death of Alan
Ghost Story
