"There are few poets right now capable of capturing the ever-extending, doubling back, reaching, twisting, self-contradictory, fluttering flux of consciousness with as much conviction, poignancy, aching humor, and formal excitement as Alan Shapiro–what happens in his sentences are a marvel of this ancient living technology we call poetry. Whether in crafty prose or tighter verse, mind and language are always in dynamic play in his new book, as he grapples with the most immediate and difficult binding forces of love, hope, vulnerability, intimacy, and the darker ones of shame, regret, anger, ignorance, and desire: poem after poem, the balance is struck by formally achieving the interplay between intuitions of freedom and acknowledgments of constraint and impossibility. With the sharp insight and spoken vigor of a novelist drawn to dramatic ironies and with concentrated lyric energy and lift, Shapiro's artistry reaffirms poetry's central and enduring role in our private and social lives, not for its visionary fictions, but for its infinitely rich realities about who we are to ourselves and to each other."–Joshua Weiner, author of Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees?
