"Searing, hauntingly sad, often hilarious, these poems . . . reconnect the circuits of the soul." —Martha C. Nussbaum, University of ChicagoWe 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 poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation?Writing at the limits of language—where "t...

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...

"In deft, quiet language," the Pulitzer Prize finalist "recalls the past and how it sometimes hurts" in his latest poetry collection ( Library Journal).Alan Shapiro's newest book of poetry explores 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...

More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and an artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that only Alan Shapiro could have written.In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventions—of literary and social norms—in how we fashion our...

Poetry about places—from a supermarket to a strip club to a suburban home—from a poet who "seeks what lies at the deepest level of the human heart" ( Chicago Tribune).In Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro takes us on an unsettling night tour of America's public places—a gas station restroom, shoe store, convention hall, and race track, among others—and in stark Edward Hopper–like imagery reveals the surreal and dreamlike features of these familia...

A book of essays by one of the most celebrated American poets of the last fifty years, "A Dress Rehearsal for the Truth" is part memoir and part literary exploration. In the autobiographical essays, Alan Shapiro tells of his Jewish childhood in Boston in the 1950s, narrates the events of his youth that made him pivot from aspiring to be a professional basketball player to wanting to write poetry, and relates how family tragedy forced him to use his personal sorrow as fuel to create persona...

As a little girl growing up in Boston, Miriam Bluestein fantasized about a life lived on stage, specifically in a musical. Get married, have a family—sure, maybe she’d do those things, too, but first and foremost there was her career. As a woman, she is both tormented and consoled by those dreams in her day-to-day existence with her family, including a short-tempered husband, a cranky mother, and three demanding children, one of whom, Ethan, shows real talent for the stage.It is th...

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 natural world, and even the outer spaces of the cosmos itself. In language richly nuanced yet accessible, these poems inhabit and explore fundamental questions of existence, such as time, mortality, consciousness, and matter. How did we get here? Why is there something rather than noth...

Jim Carlsons most vivid memories of childhood are of his estranged fathers obsession with parring the Savage. Located on the island of Caramus, the 458-yard, par 4, 16th hole at Wild Links has presumably never been parred. At age twenty-five, Jim sets off to Caramus. Over the course of this golfing weekend, his life is forever transformed. There is the beautiful Tina, who presents Jim with a challenge to rival his own dream of parring the Savage. And there is John; a handsome, solidly buil...

Cars propelled with magnetism. Hologram images of past and present movie stars projected into the room for you to dance with and talk to.Waterless showers. All part of life in Femeron by the end of the century. This humorous scifi satire is a tale that takes the Battle of the Sexes to new heights. We are in the year 2090, the United States long ago allowed California and the other western states to secede from the Union. Inside the re-formed United States, now known as Femeron, onl...

At the apex of the Civil Rights movement in America a young man from New Jersey was deployed to fight in our nation's first fully integrated war. Assigned to the 1****st Infantry Division from October 1967 to October 1968, he shared the experience of combat with young men from all ethnic and economic backgrounds. Embracing their differences, they used their diverse backgrounds to draw on strengths and combined wisdom to deal with the dangers and difficulties that i...

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. The volume brings together four major works by one of the great classical dramatists: Prometheus Bound, translated by James Scully and C. John Her...