Looking at examples from Ross Gay, William Carlos Williams, C.K. Williams, Lucille Clifton, Thom Gunn, James Baldwin, and more, Alan Shapiro tracks the patterns and changes within poems and across time that make it possible for poems to “meet the needs of ever-changing individuals in an ever-changing language, and an ever-changing world.”

“What no one ever spoke of / was saying itself through the little that was said.” Race, money, power, resentment, and unspoken understandings, frequently misunderstood but still inherited, swirl like smoke through memory in a new poem from Alan Shapiro.

Responding to a friend’s poem and playing on the phrase “Thanks for Nothing,” Alan Shapiro offers an intricate song of praise to nothingness–“blind giver and dumb taker, / my stone deaf end / and origin, whom / I pretend / hears me pretend / to thank for being”–that is also an exquisite poem of gratitude for all the hunger that led to “this last, this / best love.”