Life Pig

Shapiro Alan

From "Let Me Hear You":

Outside is inside now
The pyramid whose point
we are is weightless
and invisible
and has become itself the night
in which alone
together
on a high plateau
we go on shouting
out whatever name
those winds keep blowing back
into the mouth that's shouting it

Alan Shapiro's newest book of poetry is situated at 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.

About the Author

Alan Shapiro has published many books, including "Reel to Reel", a Pulitzer Prize finalist. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A new collection of essays, "That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration", is also available this fall from the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"In deft, quiet language, National Book Award finalist Shapiro... recalls the past and how it sometimes hurts... Capturing what many of his readers face, Shapiro... has his moment of triumph and honor" – Library Journal

"Shapiro's wonderful and deft volume opens new possibilities for the public and private poem. From the 'sugar high' of an astronaut's step on television, to the 'sleep and terror' of a lost decade of youth, to the wrenching deathbed images of a parent, this book has all the music of public elegy and all the intimacy of a private soliloquy. These moving and powerfully crafted poems make us participants, not spectators. They draw us into deeper understandings of our own losses and give us a language for what often seems beyond speech" – Eavan Boland, author of "A Woman Without a Country"

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