AT THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF

A book of poetry and drawings that explore emotional disconnections, silences, and efforts to make contact.

In the introduction to her second full-length collection, which includes several pieces that were previously published in literary journals, Shapiro states her purpose is to pursue “extremes of feeling” and their resulting epiphanies through “experimenting with form and content.” These experiments encompass diagrams, sketches, spacing, and unusual typography, which often focus attention on conceptual organization. “What We Know,” for example, is organized around a long vertical line with arrows pointing up at the top and down at the bottom. Centered on this line, a short stanza reads “Before the beginning / After the end,” and from the double space that separates them, a hand-drawn arrow loops up to a balloon circled around the phrase “Why here?” The piece plays with the concept of lines—poetry, direction, time—perhaps to show how the here and now is a constantly moving target. “John Cage in the Wild,” “Quaker Meeting on the Concord River,” “Dividing Line,” and “Ellipses” address similar themes, often suggested in their titles. Sometimes silences can reveal meaning, as with Quaker quietism, but at other times, they reflect painful truths or traumas that overcome the quiet, as in several poems about rape. Shapiro uses typography expressively, as well, as in “Blow Up,” in which the type size echoes its recommendation to inflate, then smash its sentences before reaching “the deepest silence ever heard.” Other experiments are less effective, however, as in “Right Triangles,” a diagram reminiscent of a therapy-group handout, or “Mixed Message,” which graphically represents but doesn’t offer insight into indecision.

Poems that creatively reveal the unsaid and unsayable.