Broadway for Paul

Friendship, love, and the potential energy of change animate these poems of walking through the New York City.
Broadway, the famous artery, both off the grid and definitive of Manhattan as it cuts its way downtown, is a metaphor for Katz's path through these poems: from Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side to the African Burial Ground and the courthouse downtown, Katz mines his native city for the deep humanity that undergirds its streets. His title, with its implication that one could give something as large and undefinable as Broadway to a single person, courts an impossibility that generates the possibility of friendship, as well as the largesse Katz wants to find in our civic discourse. In poems such as "Juneteenth," "Ivanka Skirting," and "This Beautiful Bubble," we encounter his reckoning with a divisive culture that can, he suggests, be healed through our daily acts—through a kind of alert graciousness that also defines his poetry. In this moving collection,...