Proceed to Check Out

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. "Shapiro's artistry reaffirms poetry's central and enduring role in our private and social lives, not for its visionary fictions, but for its infinitely rich realities about who we are to ourselves and to each other." —Joshua Weiner, author of Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees? "Every sentence and every line of Proceed to Check Out sparkles—with formal precision and imaginative openness, social conscience and psychological savvy, hilarity and fatalism, unsparing skepticism and unstinting sympathy." —Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls

© 2022 The University of Chicago Press (E-bog): 9780226817552

Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 25. marts 2022