Other Worlds

<i>Other Worlds</i> is true to its title, from a look at our everyday joys and griefs as interpreted by the Mars of classic science fiction and the crazy domain of quantum physics; to studies of the many conflicting realities that America uneasily accommodates in a time of pandemic and protests; to elegiac poems informed by the realms of memory, ghosts, and imagined afterlives. From a poem of one line to a sequence of twelve sections, from comic hijinks to despair, and from private revelation to public declaiming, this is a bravura performance by the only poet to have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award and who, at age seventy-three, is writing at the height of his powers. <br><br><br><b>Excerpt from “Last Song”</b><br><br>I choose the other way,<br>with heels dug in.<br>I vote for screaming<br><br>yearningly. For heading into the afterlife<br>against the grain of this one. For a slowing down<br>to the pace of a person too absorbed<br>in the glory and grit<br>to work up any hurry for departing it.