Alan Shapiro is an American poet and professor whose work often delves into the depths of human experience with penetrating honesty. Through both his poetry and personal memoirs, he explores complex relationships and universal themes with a keen eye for detail and evocative language. Shapiro masterfully captures the fragility of existence and the search for meaning in everyday moments, resonating with readers through his authenticity and profound insights.
The collection showcases Alan Shapiro's early poetic exploration of historical narratives, divided into two distinct parts. The first section delves into the Irish Famine of the mid-19th century, while the second examines themes of demonic possession in late 17th-century New England. Through vivid imagery and poignant reflection, Shapiro captures the complexities of these historical events, offering readers a profound insight into the human experience during tumultuous times.
Exploring the profound emotions surrounding grief, Alan Shapiro's collection delves into the complex feelings experienced during the terminal illness of his brother, David, an actor diagnosed with brain cancer. The poems capture a raw and intimate journey through the final months of David's life, addressing often-overlooked emotions such as horror, relief, and self-criticism. Shapiro's work offers a candid reflection on the multifaceted nature of loss, revealing the tumultuous yet transformative experience of mourning.
Exploring the complexities of love and loss, this collection opens with the turmoil of a crumbling marriage, capturing the emotions of anger and suspicion. It transitions to a celebration of love's resilience and the beauty of romantic renewal in middle age. Through inventive myth and vivid imagery, the poems convey a yearning for connection, reflecting on the fragility and intensity of love shaped by past experiences. Shapiro's lyrical portraits resonate deeply, highlighting the transformative power of love amidst uncertainty.
Dr. Alan Shapiro explores how personality traits affect both daily life and golf performance. He identifies six "Mental Hazards" that influence golfers, such as anxiety and control issues. By taking a 48-question quiz, readers can discover their Mental Hazard Profile and receive tailored advice to improve their game and mindset.
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.
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 poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language—where “the signs loosen, fray, and drift”—Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn’t yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking “girly”; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss—moving against the current in the direction of the utterly ineffable.
Miriam Bluestein's childhood dreams of a musical career clash with her reality as a mother of three in Boston. Torn between her aspirations and family obligations, she navigates the challenges of a short-tempered husband and a demanding household. Her passion for the stage is reignited through her son Ethan, who displays a genuine talent for performance. This story explores the tension between personal ambition and familial duty, highlighting the complexities of a woman's journey in pursuit of her dreams amidst everyday life.
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 built enigma of a young man who can knock the cover off a golf ball and plans to make his own run at the Savageby using a gold ball, a 9-iron, and a little bit of magic.Nine-Iron John is a tale about reconciling a painful past with the hope for the future. Its about fathers and sons, the fertile territory of the male ego, about coming to terms with the pursuit of athletic and sexual conquests. Its about the search for dignity and self-respect, the desire to love and to be loved. It is the story of the journey that all men begin that only a select few ever manage to successfully complete.
Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism