The Dead Alive and Busy. By Alan Shapiro. The University of Chicago Press, 82 pages, $30 (cloth), $12 (paper).

This book won Alan Shapiro the country’s biggest award for a book of poetry by one author. But more valuable was immortalizing experiences that might otherwise be overlooked.

In the first set of poems, Shapiro, professor of English, tells stories about his aging parents. He uses small mom-ents such as taking a bath to show their humor and strength as they face increasing frailty. The third set of poems is about Shapiro’s sister Beth, who died of breast cancer when she was 49. Shapiro was with her during the last five weeks of her life.

“They’re the kinds of things that happen to most people, and they’re also experiences that people tend not to talk that much about,” Shapiro says. “I hope that the poems create a kind of ritual space within which experiences that we think are purely our own can be seen as something general and shared.”

The poems in the book’s middle section touch on various topics but are tied together by classical or biblical references. “If you think of classical or biblical stories as ways in which the dead stay active among the living, the dead are present in all the poems despite the wide range of subjects and occasions,” Shapiro says.

In April, the book won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, given annually by Claremont Graduate University in California. It comes with a $75,000 prize. In May, the book was number two on the Los Angeles Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list.