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.
