Daniel Shapiro

Woman at the Cusp of Twilight Daniel Shapiro

Poetry. WOMAN AT THE CUSP OF TWILIGHT draws on photographs, anecdotes, letters and other documents to weave a unique portrait of the author's maternal family from the early 20th century to the present, one reminiscent of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology yet wholly its own. Moving snapshots cast in verse capture glimpses of family members in various settings over time--his grandmother traveling to California at the dawn of Hollywood, his great-aunt dancing the Charleston in her high-school auditorium, his grandfather's dream of breeding a black rose during the Depression, and his mother's adventures as a teenager at Coney Island after the War. The collection touches on figures including Fred Astaire, Isadora Duncan, George Gershwin, Martha Graham, and FDR; and on historical moments spanning from the Great War to the 1960s. Concrete poems shaped like a parachute, a sailboat, a topiary shrub, even a champagne flute, will intrigue and delight the reader. WOMAN AT THE CUSP OF TWILIGHT is at once a personal testament on the life of the imagination and a meditation on history, on what is past, and passing, and to come.