Where’s the Poet Now?

Where’s the Poet (Now)? gathers more than fifty years of Ron Singer’s poetry into a vivid and deeply observant portrait of New York City. Drawn from work written between the 1970s and 2023, the collection captures the evolving texture of the city through the eyes of a poet who has spent decades walking its streets, studying its contradictions, and bearing witness to its transformations.While Singer’s earlier collections explored landscapes stretching from Maine to the American Southwest to multiple African nations, this volume remains firmly rooted in New York as both physical environment and emotional terrain. These poems move through crowded sidewalks, construction zones, subway platforms, parks, apartments, and neighborhoods shaped by constant motion and unequal power. Singer writes with equal attention to beauty and exhaustion, finding moments of color, tenderness, humor, and human connection inside a city often defined by noise, wealth disparity, speed, and isolation.Throughout the collection, classical literary traditions intersect with contemporary urban experience. References to Keats, Virgil, Milton, and other literary figures appear alongside sirens, scaffolding, and overheard conversations, creating a dialogue between past and present, permanence and impermanence.Humorous, reflective, and sharply attentive, Where’s the Poet (Now)? becomes more than a collection of poems. It is a long-form act of witnessing: a record of what it means to remain alert, vulnerable, and artistically alive while the city endlessly changes around you.