Zoom Rooms

Poems

De: Mary Jo Salter

Narrado por: Hillary Huber, John Lee, Guy Smith

The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prize-winning poet.

In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives.

The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings - a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family - finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: In “Island Diaries”, the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero. Poems that meditate on objects - a silk blouse, a hot water bottle - address the human need to heal and console. Our paradoxically solitary but communal experiences find expression, too, in poems about art, from a Walker Evans photograph to a gilded Giotto altarpiece.

In these beautiful new poems, Salter directs us to moments we may otherwise miss, reminding us that alertness is itself a form of gratitude.

©2022 Mary Jo Salter (P)2022 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"What I so admire about Salter’s work is that directness never comes at the expense of deep thought, nor does a baseline cheerfulness and willingness to be persuaded by life’s pleasure exist without acknowledgement of senselessness and strife . . . Salter captures how our experiences of beauty aren’t quite articulable and implicitly challenge our understanding of time's passing." —Maya C. Popa, Poetry Society of America ("The Poet's Nightstand")