Life Pig

by Alan Shapiro

Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226404172
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	09/05/2016
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alan Shapiro has written many books of poetry and prose, most recently Against Translation, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration, and Reel to Reel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Shapiro  has won the Kingsley Tufts Award,   the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and an  American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award, among others, and has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his dog, Sammy.  

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsLife Pig
ONE
The Hebrew Ouija Board
The Hiawatha Recitation
The Look
Trajan’s Column
Moon Landing, 1969
Ghost of the Old Arcade
Let Me Hear You
Thanks for Nothing
TWO
Vantage
The Killing
Low Tide
Green Thought
Toward Language
Stele
Frieze
Dog Heart
Scat
On the Greenway behind My Old House
In the Hotel Room
Present
THREE
On the Beach
Her Closet
Dressing Table
The Bedroom
The Pig
Heavy Snow
Goodness and Mercy
Sweetness and Night
Accident
Mother Palinode
The Weeper
The Last Outing
Archimedes
The Sibyl’s Nursing Home
Terminal Restlessness
Enough
Visitation
CODA
Death Hog
Notes

Editorial Reviews

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

"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

"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"

From the Publisher

10/15/2016
In deft, quiet language, National Book Award finalist Shapiro (Night of the Republic) recalls the past and how it sometimes hurts, with memories ranging from a Hebrew teacher compelling him to look at Holocaust photos to having to recite Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha in school (how can he measure up to the poem's implicit "triumph and/ …honor"?). Shapiro travels to the distant past, too—a slumped figure on Trajan's column sums up the world's "machine-like slaughtering"—and present worries include aging parents. Even a lovely walk at low tide is tinged with momentary shadow (he's "thoughtless like a leper without a bell"), but Shapiro is more forthright than grim. VERDICT Capturing what many of his readers face, Shapiro finally has his moment of triumph and honor.

Library Journal