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From award winner Mary Jo Salter, new poems touching on the wonders of ordinary life and the brevity and preciousness of our time on earth
With her signature dark humor—one eye on our possible redemption, the other on the human comedy—Salter here offers sparkling poems that consider youth and age, speaking and silence. As with her grandmother’s cameo ring, long stashed in a drawer for fear she’d lose it but now fitting her finger perfectly, the poems are often drawn from her intimate life and the collapsing span of years: “Where did they all go, / my go-go boots, bell-bottoms, / shoulder pads, opinions?” the speaker wonders. Elsewhere, in the “omniscient” full moon flickering between trees, the jab of the vaccine needle in a baby’s thigh, or the cutting beauty of a single tear frozen at high altitude, Salter engages with the disparate and dazzling range of our experiences, summoning the rewards of connection and awareness, as well as the sorrow at what we sometimes can’t express to one another.
Alternating short lyrics with richer long narratives, flowing down the page in witty, melodious stanzas, Salter’s poems expand our sense of gratitude for our brief “cameo appearance” in the one life we have.
Mary Jo Salter
Mary Jo Salter is Professor Emerita in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she taught from 2007 to 2022. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, all published by Knopf, including most recently The Surveyors and Zoom Rooms. Former poetry editor of The New Republic, coeditor of three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1996, 2005, and 2018), and editor of Amy Clampitt’s selected and collected poems, Salter is also an essayist, a lyricist, and a children’s book author. She lives in Baltimore.
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