Since his precocious first book, published when he was eighteen, award-winning David Shapiro's four previous volumes of poetry have been hailed by Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lopate, and John Ashbery. "A Burning Interior" offers a restless poetry dense with stories but without mere confession or whimsical surface. It is a collection both universal and, at the same time, powerfully Jewish.
Shapiro's assured voice shows both range and virtuosity-included in this masterful collection are poems for Picasso, translations of Baudelaire and Rilke, amusing "found art poetry," moving elegies, rhymed translations, and dazzling prose poems.