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Zoom Rooms
- Poems
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber, John Lee, Guy Smith
- Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
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Zoom Rooms
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Summary
The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prize-winning 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.