About 45 years ago, a mysterious “plague” was gripping the gay community and the band Talking Heads was pioneering new wave music. These events, along with his surroundings of greater Boston, were key factors in Gregg Shapiro’s formative years.

The longtime South Florida poet is revisiting many of these themes in his new book, “Speaking In Italics.” The title is a play on the Talking Heads album Speaking In Tongues. 

The new book is the fifth in a series and his eighth book of poems. Many of the pieces touch on age and decay, invoking imagery of rotten teeth, gnarled hands, chapped lips and chipped teeth. What’s intriguing is that many of them were written in the septugenarian’s younger days of middle age. 

He will share some of this work at a poetry reading June 3 at Benzaiten Center for the Arts located in West Palm Beach. 

There will be Q&A after. Shapiro, a fellow OutSFL reporter, also did a Q&A with us and talked about the long journey some of these poems took before seeing publication. 

Questions and responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

Many of these poems read like a commentary and reflection about this stage of your life, yet many were first written decades ago. 

Somewhere there are notebooks with handwritten poems. They were written and at some point sent out. We could be talking 40 years of revision. I would go back and be like ‘no this doesn’t work, what can I do to change this?’ 

Given the imagery, are you scared of, intrigued by, or engaging with death? 

I’ve written a lot about death over the years. As a young gay man in the 1980s and into the 90s, I had a lot of loss. I lost a lot of friends. That colored my world view in a way. This is part of my everyday life now. Until it changes, that’s how it’s going to be. Those descriptions are observations. 

Now that you’re in a stage of life where death and funerals are an accepted part of life, do you think the revisions reflect a different level of authenticity? 

Now I’m seeing my friends, my age and even a little younger, are just dying of natural causes. So I lost this generation of friends when I was young. Now we’re at the point of oh, now it’s heart disease or cancer. Part of me feels that I’ve been through this, why do I have to go through this again? Yet, that’s how it’s gonna be. Being an old person now, I’ve inherited this chapter. 

Talk a bit about why there are a lot of references to Boston and the timing of this publication. 

I write a lot about place. Place is very important in my work. As you can tell, a number of the poems are set in Boston, including Dancing With Cockroaches In the North End. So while a lot of these poems are almost old enough to collect social security and have been revised hundreds of times, I thought now these poems need to be put together in a book.