Description
The latest collection from prize-winning poet, Alan Shapiro — his best yet.
The poems in BY AND BY are both painfully intimate and otherworldly, enmeshed in contemporary culture and personal life, even while they view that life, that culture with an outraged, affectionate detachment born of a big picture sense of political and literary history. By turns funny and broken hearted, ironic and troubled, with idiomatic exactness and formal range, Shapiro explores the vagaries of a globalized world that complicates, if not destroys, the connections that it claims to serve.
Poetry.
“Alan Shapiro has written some of the most piercing anti-elegiac elegies of
our time. He’s addressed social issues with a rare linguistic inventiveness that
makes him a citizen of the world of language, free of cant, attitudinizing, or
moral hand wringing. The recursive nature of his syntax can capture every
self-contradictory flicker of consciousness as it grapples with how love turns
to lovelessness, and how we connive at our own misfortunes even as we
suffer them. In his new book, BY AND BY, however dark his subject matter
might seem—extinction of self and species, the inevitable hypocrisies and
double-binds of mismatched lovers, the fact of age and aging as a moment
by moment process of physical debilitation and slow disappearance from
the world—the utter joyousness that he takes in every line he writes makes
every poem feel like a triumph of poetic consciousness. But it’s not so much
a triumph over anything, as it is a sense of being continuous with everything.
In poem after poem, his language finds unique ways to dignify and uplift
whatever his imagination lights on. There is nothing too small or too large
for the radical inclusiveness of his attention.”
—Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch
“Alan Shapiro’s BY AND BY is an absolute stunner, from one of the finest
poets in America. It journeys through an underworld of memory, as our hero
sings of the past with wit, and sympathy, and fierce intelligence—whether he
meets the shade of a beloved friend, or a former lover, or a childhood family
so long dead the poet’s ‘thought is all that’s left of them.’ In poem after poem
Shapiro’s daring, high-wire sentences lead us out past lament and praise, out
past any irritable reaching after fact, to dwell on mortality, and how it feels to
live inside ‘the mind, calling and calling from the cliff it is, in the night it is.’
Read these poems to glimpse the afterlife that awaits us all ‘inside [a] phone,
hanging by a thread of soon to be deleted texts.’ Read them to hear just how
urgent and powerful lyric poetry can be in the 21st century.”
—Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine
Author Bio
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Alan Shapiro was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his BA from Brandeis University, and taught for the last 25 years at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Recipient of numerous awards and honors, he has published many books of poetry, including, most recently, Proceed to Check Out (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Against Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Reel to Reel (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Night of the Republic (finalist for both the National Book Award and the International Griffin Prize, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). He has also published several books of critical essays, a novel, Broadway Baby (Algonquin Books, 2012), and translations of Greek tragedy.
Author City: SOUTH GLASTONBURY, CT USA