Book cover of By and By: Poems

Book description

The latest collection from prize-winning poet, Alan Shapiro--his best yet.

The poems in BY AND BY are both painfully intimate and otherworldly, enmeshed in contemporary culture and personal life, even while they view that life, that culture with an outraged, affectionate detachment born of a big picture sense of political…


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Why read it?

1 author picked By and By as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

At first, Alan Shapiro’s brilliant book By And By scared me a little with its persistent subject, the varieties of woe — from minor to major, from ludicrous inconvenience to mortality itself.

But in fact, the book cheered me up and engaged me in its actual, central emotion, not woe but wonder: astonishment that this, too, whatever it is, can be a part of a poem, part of life.

He loves understanding: the transforming, unquenchable work of imagination.

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