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Description of  Proceed to Check Out (Phoenix Poets)

Award-winning poet Alan Shapiro offers a new collection of poems reflecting on mortality and finitude. Alan Shapiros fourteenth collection of poetry, Proceed to Check Out, is a kind of summing up, or stock-taking, by an aging poet, of his precarious place in a world dominated by the ever-accelerating pace of technological innovation, political disruption, personal loss, and racial strife. These poems take on fundamental subjectslike the nature of time and consciousness and how or why we become who we arebut Shapiro presses them into becoming urgent and timely. Employing idiomatic range and formal variety, Shapiros poems move through recurring dreams, the coercions of childhood, and the mysterious connections of mind and matter, pleasure and memory. They meet an abiding need to find empathy and understanding in even the most challenging placesamid disaffection, public discord, and estrangement. His grasp of contemporary lifein all its insidious violence and beautyis distinct, comprehensive, and profound. Read more