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The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prizewinning 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.
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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