Other Worlds (Pitt Poetry Series)

Other Worlds is true to its title, from a look at our everyday joys and griefs as interpreted by the Mars of classic science fiction and the crazy domain of quantum physics; to studies of the many conflicting realities that America uneasily accommodates in a time of pandemic and protests; to elegiac poems informed by the realms of memory, ghosts, and imagined afterlives. From a poem of one line to a sequence of twelve sections, from comic hijinks to despair, and from private revelation to public declaiming, this is a bravura performance by the only poet to have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award and who, at age seventy-three, is writing at the height of his powers. Excerpt from “Last Song” I choose the other way, with heels dug in. I vote for screaming yearningly. For heading into the afterlife against the grain of this one. For a slowing down to the pace of a person too absorbed in the glory and grit to work up any hurry for departing it.