Zoom Rooms

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.