"Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing - even lurid - hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century, from Cotton Mather and a nineteenth-century minstrel boy to B-movie actress Barbara Payton, a female Elvis impersonator, and even Paris Hilton, Polito tracks the stars, rituals, snares, hijinks,...

"These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what's unspoken and unbidden. While we're receiving a call or while we're passing through an X-ray machine, the personal is intersected--sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly--with the hum and buzz of the culture. Whether in New York or Tuscaloosa,...

"A sequel of sorts to "Ziggurat," published in the Phoenix Poets series in 2010, the title poem from "Ozone Journal" recounts the memory of the speaker's excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a TV journalist crew in 2009. The speaker "dreams back," as it were, to the 1980s, when, as a young man in his thirties and caring for a young daughter after a recent divorce, he is having to juggle both personal and cultural/historical...

Alan Shapiro's newest book of poetry explores 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...

"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...