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
More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration” is part memoir, part literary criticism, and a thorough and artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait o
From Let Me Hear You Outside is inside now.The pyramid whose pointwe are is weightlessand invisibleand has become itself the nightin which alonetogetheron a high plateauwe go on shoutingout whate
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 n
Alan Shapiro is at his most passionate in this collection. A work full of life, jealousy, lust, and romantic abandon, Tantalus in Love begins with the sorrow of a disintegrating marriage, with its ang
The poems in Alan Shapiro's seventh collection, Song and Dance, intimately describe the complicated feelings that attend the catastrophic loss of a loved one. In 1998, Shapiro's brother, David, an act
After the Digging provides an exceptional look at the early work of acclaimed poet Alan Shapiro. His first collection of poems allows readers to realize his strong sense of historical narrative and gi
The author traces his coming-of-age as an aspiring poet in a Jewish household in the late sixties, exploring how his discovery of particular poems shaped his life, from his relationship to Judaism to
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), a
"Within his deliberately narrowed range Mr. Shapiro has cultivated a new generosity of detail and insight. This is especially important in the longer poems here, narratives of considerable power. They
