Life Pig (Phoenix Poets)

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.
 

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.