"In the difficult pandemic year, Susan M. Schultz returns to her sources: as a sports fan, Buddhist meditator, John Ashbery scholar, philosophic writer, literature professor, publisher. Her work provokes us with observations on love, death, family, neighborliness, social violence, racial reckoning. From the pandemic to the Trump presidency to Black Lives Matter, these meditations ponder the large-scale upheaval of 2020, discovering connection in the midst of destruction that spares no one: not Trump, not George Floyd, nor the landlady in Diamond Head murdered by a tenant. Ultimately, we are guided to read these poems of memory and presence, of vision and wakefulness, through the practices of surrendering and witnessing, and in doing so, discover that being present is a powerful form of compassion. Meditations is a riveting invitation to see, to reimagine with a communal eye the otherwise cold individualism of our turbulent historical moment"--