<b>The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment from the prizewinning poet.</b><br><br>In <i>Zoom Rooms</i> Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence together with the enduring constants in our lives.<br> <br>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.<br> <br>In these beautiful new poems Salter directs us to moments we may otherwise miss reminding us that alertness is itself a form of gratitude.