Zoom Rooms
Play sample
  • Published: 3 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9780593321317
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $55.00
Categories:

Zoom Rooms

Poems

Formats & editions
EBook
29 Mar 2022
Audiobook
29 Mar 2022
Hardback
3 May 2022
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

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

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.
 
  • Published: 3 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9780593321317
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $55.00
Categories:

Also by Mary Jo Salter

The Surveyors
A Phone Call To The Future
Open Shutters
See all

Praise for Zoom Rooms

   • “A capacious and ambitious collection . . . Salter’s formal prowess is on display, as is her rueful wisdom, her vivid eye and memory for detail, and her ability to collapse time.” —Rachel Hadas, Los Angeles Review of Books
   • “Unforgettable . . . These are poems of a woman passionately living her life . . . At once erudite and spontaneous, serious and lighthearted.” —Laverne Firth, New York Journal of Books
   • “Smart, quirky, and offbeat . . . A lively mix of wit and imagination . . . [Salter] showcases her impeccable form, her lines as tight and sharp as rapiers . . . A poetry collection to cherish.” —Scott Neuffer, Shelf Awareness
   • “Essential not only for Salter’s fans but for readers of poetry in general . . . Salter has been working with quiet excellence as a poet since the publication of her first collection in 1985 . . . She is superbly skilled in the old appurtenances of meter and rhyme . . . but her ease extends to her freer lyric style as well . . . Salter provides sane and long-lasting rewards." —Library Journal (starred review)

penguin pop image
penguin pop image