Cameo Appearance

From award winner Mary Jo Salter, new poems touching on the wonders of ordinary life and the brevity and preciousness of our time on earth

With her signature dark humor—one eye on our possible redemption, the other on the human comedy—Salter here offers sparkling poems that consider youth and age, speaking and silence. As with her grandmother’s cameo ring, long stashed in a drawer for fear she’d lose it, but now fitting her finger perfectly, the poems are often drawn from her intimate life and the collapsing span of years: “Where did they all go,/ my go-go boots, bell-bottoms, / shoulder pads, opinions?” she wonders. Elsewhere, in the “omniscient” full moon flickering between trees, the jab of the vaccine needle in a baby’s thigh, or the cutting beauty of a single tear frozen at high altitude, Salter engages with the disparate and dazzling range of our experiences, summoning the rewards of connection and awareness, the sorrow at what we sometimes can’t express to one another.

Alternating short lyrics with richer long narratives, flowing down the page in witty, melodious stanzas, Salter’s poems expand our sense of gratitude for our brief “cameo appearance” in the one life we have.MARY JO SALTER is the Professor Emerita in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of nine previous poetry collections and a children’s book, and is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She lives in Baltimore.