Life Pig

"In deft, quiet language," the Pulitzer Prize finalist "recalls the past and how it sometimes hurts" in his latest poetry collection (Library Journal). 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 of this particular moment.