Pitt Poetry
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American Poetry Now
by Various Authors
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
American Poetry Now is a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America's finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Virgil Suarez, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others. Throughout its forty-year history, the Pitt Poetry Series has provided a voice for the diversity that is American poetry, representing poets from many backgrounds without allegiance to any one school or style. American Poetry Now is a true representation of contemporary American poetry. Ed Ochester, series editor for nearly thirty years, has assembled a quintessential selection-along with biographies and photos, an enlightening introduction, and a suggested list for further reading, all in a highly accessible format. American Poetry Now is a sweeping anthology that will delight poetry fans, students, teachers, and general readers alike.
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Lucky Bones
by Peter Meinke
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In Lucky Bones, Peter Meinke moves fluidly through free and formal shapes, taking the reader on a tour through America in the 21st century: family, politics, love, war and peace, old age and death are looked at in ways that are surprising, clear, and warm-hearted. Lit by flashes of anger and laughter as he surveys his territory from the vantage point of old age, the poems are, in the end, both sane and profound, set to Meinke's own music.
Consisting of over sixty new poems, the book begins with a house-shaped poem about a family in a beloved old home, and then moves out into the world with poems about a fire-bug, drive-by shootings, and the often violent human condition before circling back to the home and a final epitaph. A clear-eyed feeling of loss permeates Lucky Bones, but not despair: in the midst of conflict, Meinke's world is full of wonder, and wonderful people.
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Emplumada
by Lorna Dee Cervantes
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes's first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience.
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Hyperboreal
by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Hyperboreal originates from diasporas. It attempts to make sense of change and to prepare for cultural, climate, and political turns that are sure to continue. The poems originate from the hope that our lives may be enriched by the expression of and reflection on the cultural strengths inherent to indigenous culture. It concerns King Island, the ancestral home of the author's family until the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly and permanently relocated its residents. The poems work towards the assembly of an identity, both collective and singular, that is capable of looking forward from the recollection and impact of an entire community's relocation to distant and arbitrary urban centers. Through language, Hyperboreal grants forum to issues of displacement, lack of access to traditional lands and resources and loss of family that King Island people-and all Inuit-are contending with.
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The Rock That Is Not a Rabbit
Poems
by Corey Marks
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift "billowing, unattached," and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon's head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father's new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world.
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The Book of Life
Selected Jewish Poems, 1979–2011
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Poet Alicia Ostriker is also a highly original scholar/teacher of midrash, the commentary and exegesis of scripture (the same root as madrasa, place of study). Here she \u2018studies' Jewish history, Jewish passion, Jewish contradictions, in a compendium of learned, crafted, earthy and outward-looking poems that show how this quest has informed and enriched her whole poet's trajectory.\u201d
-Marilyn Hacker
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The Tormented Mirror
by Russell Edson
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
This is the first book in the Pitt Poetry Series by this popular and enigmatic poet, considered the foremost writer of prose poetry in America. In eleven collections over thirty years, Edson has created his own poetic genre, a surreal philosophical fable, easy to enter, but difficult to leave behind. In The Tormented Mirror, Edson continues and refines his form in seventy-three new poems.
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Playlist
Poems
by David Lehman
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Synopsis currently unavailable.
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Fire Series
Poems
by Kelly Hoffer
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Fire is both destructive and regenerative; at times vengeful, at others cleansing. The first mention of fire in Genesis comes after Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden. In Greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire from the gods for humankind. Fire becomes metaphorically layered-as knowledge, as desire, as anger. The book entertains the many strands of this fiery lineage as it undertakes a poetic investigation into grief and sex, loneliness and restlessness within intimacy, and language's ability to make, unmake, and remake things. Hoffer engages in questions of gender, anger, and nationality-how women are made subject to expectations of care and fidelity. How Americans are called into conflicts that defy sense, that defy humanist values. The voice is angry as she struggles with the limitations of her agency and further frustrated that "speaking directly" does not seem to furnish progress or power. The book, then, tries to speak otherwise-it moves sonically, associatively, obsessively.
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The Crack in Everything
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
This volume of poetry from Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of her most ambitious, ranging from laments and celebrations for a flawed world to meditations on art and artists, to a powerful exploration of illness and healing.
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The Same Man
Poems
by Bobby Elliott
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
A one-of-a-kind debut that asks what we owe those we love, The Same Man is an aching chronicle of the early days of parenthood and the wounds of the past. Haunted by memory and powered by the demands and joys of new life, Elliott's poems wrestle with the father-son relationship at their core and the deep, unspoken harms that shape us. A relentless effort toward expression and autonomy, The Same Man is a reckoning and a balm, a rallying call and a father's song of devotion.
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No Longer at This Address
Poems
by Andrew Hemmert
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
No Longer at This Address explores place and the psychology of leaving through the inflammatory lens of the American West. The collection uses the lyric-narrative mode to complicate notions of rootedness and address the ephemerality of where one's from. The poems visit bison ranches in the Rocky Mountains, converse with a collapsed satellite, and find complicated joy among wildfire ash and lost dogs. No Longer at This Address is a catalog of various departures and arrivals and ultimately paints a portrait of one man's attempt to make a new home with his loved ones in a volatile and uncertain future.
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Burn
Poems
by Barbara Hamby
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The world is burning with fire and hatred, but at the same time it is filled with love and incredible beauty. The poems in Burn tango with why the world is so beautiful and terrible at the same time. Hamby asserts that everything is a mess-how do we walk through it laughing and crying? Sometimes you look back and think, "How was I so lucky? I could have died a thousand times, but I didn't. But I will."
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No Rhododendron
Poems
by Samyak Shertok
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker's father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertok's oral mother tongue, Tamang: How do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring the erasure, ambiguity, multiplicity, violence, and unknowability signified by "X," the poems dwell on the lip of a new ghost language, which ultimately fails itself. The polyphonal witnessing of the decade-long Maoist conflict in his native Nepal from schoolchildren's perspective reveals how a war can fracture the psyche of an entire generation. The final thread of the book, a "reverse-elegy" for his mother, meditates on the impending loss of a loved one as a potential site of mourning, impermanence, gratitude, memory-making, and mythopoeticism.
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I
New & Selected Poems
by Toi Derricotte
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Toi Derricotte's story is a hero's journey-a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. "I": New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet's inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy.It is a record of one woman's response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.
This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.
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Peach State
Poems
by Adrienne Su
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author's hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region's invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city's transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms-sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas-they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience.
Excerpt from "You're from the South?"
As if it had never joined the Union.
As if we had to go through Customs
when bringing Vidalia onions
to uncles and cousins
in the North, where Confucians
and their brethren flock for education.
As if our speech required translation
or at least interpretation.
As if Hartsfield-Jackson
were a plantation,
the Amtrak Crescent
a moon over rows of cotton,
and all of us a population
that never saw snow or migration.
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The Dirt She Ate
Selected And New Poems
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Suffused with pain and power, Minnie Bruce Pratt's poetry is as evocative of the swamps and streets of the southern United States as it is of the emotional lives of those too often forced into the margins of society. Vivid, lush, and intensely honest, these poems capture the rough edges of the world and force us to pay attention.
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The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
This book by a major American poet is for poetry readers at all levels, academic and non-academic. It is a sequence of poems that will surprise and delight readers-in the voices of an old woman full of memories, a glamorous tulip, and an earthy dog who always has the last word.
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The State of the Art
A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014
by David Lehman
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The acclaimed annual, The Best American Poetry, is the most prestigious showcase of new poetry in the United States and Canada. Each year since the series began in 1988, David Lehman has contributed a foreword, and this has evolved into a sort of state-of-the-art address that surveys new developments and explores various matters facing poets and their readers today. This book collects all twenty-nine forewords (including the two written for the retrospective "Best of the Best" volumes for the tenth and twenty-fifth anniversaries.) Beginning with a new introduction by Lehman and a foreword by poet Denise Duhamel (guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013), the collection conveys a sense of American poetry in the making, year by year, over the course of a quarter of a century.
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Elegy on Toy Piano
by Dean Young
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence. Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated "Whirlpool Suite": "Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline." In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young's poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.
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The Blues of Heaven
Poems
by Barbara Ras
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In The Blues of Heaven, Barbara Ras delivers her characteristic subjects with new daring that both rattles and beguiles. Here are poems of grief over her brother's death; doors to an idiosyncratic working-class childhood among Polish immigrants; laments for nature and politics out of kilter. Ras portrays the climate crisis, guns out of control, the reckless injustice and ignorance of the United States government. At the same time, her poems nimbly focus on particulars-these facts, these consequences-bringing the wreckage of unfathomable harm home with immediacy and integrity. Though her subjects may be dire, Ras also weaves her wise humor throughout, moving deftly from sardonic to whimsical to create an expansive, ardent, and memorable book.
Survival Strategies
To dig for quahogs, to feel their edges like smiles
and pull against their suck to toss them in a bucket.
To feel the wind as a friend, to feel its current as luck.
To ignore Capricorn and Cancer presuming to slice the globe.
To know the lie in "names can never hurt you."
To be a gull breezing the blue, eating nothing but clouds.
To measure your ties to the past by the strength of cobwebs.
To haunt the widow's walk, its twelve narrow windows
each the size of a child's coffin.
To watch the harbor where the Acushnet runs into Buzzards Bay
before it was named a Superfund site full of PCBs.
To wonder if that water you swam summer after aimless summer
could get you the way something got your brother,
too fast, too soon.
To bury or burn the whole family you were born to
and talk to them only through the smoke of letters
you torch at their graves.
To see a snake with a ladybug on its back
and still refuse to pray.
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Mystery Train
by David Wojahn
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
David Wojahn deftly mixes personal history and recollections with a wide range of character studies and monologues, but the center of this book is a sequence of thirty-five poems, mainly sonnets, in which rock and roll music is a strange, kaleidoscopic mirror of recent American history. Combining rhapsodic homage, grim humor, human folly, and tragedy, these poems are like nothing else in contemporary poetry.
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Manual for Living
by Sharon Dolin
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In this sixth collection by award-winning poet Sharon Dolin, Manual for Living offers three distinct approaches to life, each one riven by flashes of joy and despair, and all conditions in between. With a fresh slant on the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the title section offers a part-serious, part tongue-in-cheek series of advice poems. An ekphrastic sequence based on the "black paintings" of Goya follows, as a darker meditation on life. The final section, "Of Hours," is a contemporary sequence of psalms where the possibility for redemption in prayer exists. As in all of her work, Dolin's lyric voice attends to language and the world equally. Her verbal sleights-of-hand offer readers insights for ways to live. Manual for Living is a wise book: drink deeply from it.
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Horsepower
Poems
by Joy Priest
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Priest's debut collection, Horsepower, is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter's waywardness as aspirational. Across the book's three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self-a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky's world-famous horseracing track-before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances. Across the collection, Priest writes a horse that acts as a metaphysical engine of flight, showing us how to throw off the harness and sustain wildness. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Priest presents a non-linear narrative in which the speaker lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South, and must instead, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of "the horses & their restless minds."
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What God in the Kingdom of Bastards
Poems
by Brian Gyamfi
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
What God in the Kingdom of Bastards is a poetic exploration of grief, memory, Blackness, and the haunting legacy of familial trauma by way of colonialism, told through the lens of two brothers: Lot, the elder, who is flesh and alive, and Frank, the younger, a ghost navigating his post-suicide existence. Their relationship anchors the collection, weaving themes of love, loss, and the arduous reconciliation between the living and the dead. Combining vivid imagery with fragmented, conversational tones of prayers, laments, and whispered confessions that are surreal and lyrical, Gyamfi delves into the ways trauma-both personal and systemic-permeates family, faith, and identity.
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High Water Mark
Prose Poems
by David Shumate
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Everyday mindreading, a house full of Buddhas, and the papaya scent of the soul. An interview with Custer at a place of his choosing, "probably a steakhouse." The ability of dogs to smell the uncool. Hitler's barber imagines what might have been if only he'd leaned his weight into the razor. An oblivious Coronado narrowly avoids an ambush on the American plains. Freud lecherously lifts the skirt of a Mexican housekeeper who has far too much work to be bothered by "a pillar of modern thought. Or just some dirty old man."In lesser hands such disparate elements might fly wildly out of control. But in David Shumate's understated, brilliant prose poems, they come together in miraculously vivid riffs. The narrator of the title poem rhapsodizes, "I wouldn't mind seeing another good flood before I die. It's been dry for decades. Next time I think I'll just let go and drift downstream and see where I end up." Shumate's deft and refreshing collection takes us to amazing places with its plainspoken meditations.
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Prelude
Poems
by Brynne Rebele-Henry
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Prelude delineates the gay female experience through a poetic reconstruction of the girlhood of Catherine of Siena, a Catholic saint who lived in 1300s Italy and disobeyed her parents by refusing marriage to devote her life to God. Through a historical lens, Brynne Rebele-Henry examines the erasure of gay women's lives and offers a perspective of medieval queer girlhood while considering themes such as violence, desire, and the lesbian body.
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Calling From the Scaffold
Poems
by Gary Gildner
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Calling from the Scaffold is a collection of poems about connecting and not connecting-of approaching the brink of connecting. It's about paying tribute and salvaging and gratitude. The voices vary in their longings: we hear from men and women, the young and no longer young. Nature often is there to help them out. The poet, also a writer of fiction and nonfiction, is interested in story, in his characters' ability to move down the road, searching for their best selves, best home, putting together the pieces that move them toward that famous happy ending.
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The New World
by Suzanne Gardinier
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 1992 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry
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Take Me to Stavanger
Poems
by Anzhelina Polonskaya
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Translated by Andrew Wachtel
Amid the din of Russia's patriotic sentiments and Instagram instants, is there any room left for the voice of a poet? Despite the many entertainments and distractions of modern life, Anzhelina Polonskaya's spare but cutting poems in Take Me to Stavanger declare a wholehearted "Yes." This bilingual Russian-English volume makes a refuge for the poet and her readers, plumbing the depths of contemporary melancholy and ennui. Beautifully crafted idiosyncratic dissections of a strong individual who refuses to go along with the currents of popular culture or political jingoism invite readers to slow down and pay attention.
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My Father's Geography
by Afaa Michael Weaver
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
“My Father's Geography” is a powerful poetry collection that explores themes of identity, family, and personal history. Weaver reflects on his relationship with his father and his experiences as an African American man navigating cultural and emotional landscapes. The poems blend intimate storytelling with broader reflections on heritage and self-discovery. Through vivid language and poignant imagery, the collection traces a journey of reconciliation, memory, and growth.
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City of Eternal Spring
by Afaa Michael Weaver
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
This is the final book in the Plum Flower Trilogy by Afaa Michael Weaver, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The two previous books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author's personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver's travels abroad in Taiwan and China, as well as showing the limits of cultural influence.
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Little Pharma
Poems
by Laura Kolbe
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The title Little Pharma is both a doppelgänger and a cri de coeur: as the poet's dreamlike double, the character Little Pharma navigates the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. At the same time, the poems plead for a return to a littler pharma, a space for stolen intimacy and momentary quiet amid the impersonal and engulfing chill that floods the anatomical theater and the corridors of illness. Little Pharma is a Dantean journey from the depths of an institution, and of a pervading personal dread, to a renewed celebration of human contact, the body, and the giddy, terrifying excitement of ongoing life.
Excerpt from "Intensive Care"
Doctor, I don my day-face
like a net of cathodes, drained
of all irruption, non-particular.
Whose mask and sign
is Sun. Enter this sickroom
bugged with surging pentecosts of light,
the green tracings
of the representative heart.
Permit now its miraculous whim.
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The Nerve of It
Poems New and Selected
by Lynn Emanuel
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Emanuel's version of a "new and selected poems" turns convention on its head. She ignores chronology, placing new poems beside old, mixing middle and early poems with recent work, and liberating all her poems from the restraints of their particular histories, both aesthetic and autobiographical. Whether writing in the comedic drag of the cartoon strip, or investigating the Mobius strip relationship between reader and writer, or exposing the humor and hurt that accompany visitations from Frank O'Hara and Gertrude Stein, The Nerve of It both stings and pleases with its intelligence, wit and vivacity. It breaks through, in ways that are bold, sexy, haunting and wry, the die-hard opposition of new and old, personal narrative and linguistic play, sincerity and irony, misery and hilarity. Open the book. Something new is happening here.
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Every Ravening Thing
Poems
by Marsha de la O.
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Author of two previous collections of poetry: BLACK HOPE (1997) and ANTIDOTE FOR NIGHT (2015). de la O is also the publisher of the journal ASKEW.
Keats at Fourteen
She dozes, her nails fretted against the linen's border,
a hectic rose flaming each cheek. Her lips move, no words.
The boy is guardian spirit, no one but he enters this sickroom
where his mother fades, home finally after six years-failures,
disgrace. Scarlet daughter, neighbors hiss, slave to appetite,
but John is single-minded-she will live. No one but he gives her
the tincture of mercury-one tenth of a grain daily, dabs the sweat
of her fevers away, a basket of withered poppies at his feet. He pierces
each capsule with a needle, drops it in a small glazed crock to warm
near the stove, sweat out the opium. Then he'll add wine, saffron,
nutmeg. It takes time, the hour darkens. He cups his hand
to light the votive. She moans a furred voice from webbed lungs,
a cup of black blood brimming, the pilgrim is fleeing the City,
he leans in closer, the City of Destruction, takes her clammy hand,
that place also where he was born, so close now he's breathing her,
"Johnny," she cries, "lift me up, Johnny, your father is here in the room.
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The Little Space
Poems Selected and New, 1968–1998
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
1998 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry1999 Finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry PrizeIn this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet's mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love "this wounded / World that we cannot heal, that is our bride."Whether she probes the meaning of childhood, family, marriage, and motherhood, or art, history, politics, and God; whether she is celebrating sexuality or confronting mortality, the poet includes "whatever I can grasp of human experience within my art-the good and beautiful, the evil and chaotic. I tell my students that they must write what they are afraid to write; and I attempt to do so myself."
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The Animals All Are Gathering
by Bradley Paul
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 2009 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry
These poems address issues of death and personal crisis by filtering them through an obsession with monsters and animals. After an initial loss, the speaker of these poems tries to utilize different personae-monsters, people stuck in horror movies-before turning his attention to the dreamlike animals that stalk him. Eventually, the speaker tries to resolve the conflicts among the figures by creating a cobbled-together garden in which they can coexist.
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The Endarkenment
by Jeffrey McDaniel
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The poet employs colloquial diction, references pop and classical culture, and travels at 1000 miles per hour in his fourth collection. For those who think contemporary poetry is about abject confessions, vacation in Provence and opaque 'academicisms,' McDaniel is an intro to a new world.
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The Last Person to Hear Your Voice
by Richard Shelton
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
While Shelton has been known primarily for his poems dealing with the landscape of the Southwest and the destruction of that landscape, the poems in this book are much more far-ranging, including many poems dealing with soocial issues (the issue of illegal immigration on our southern border, homelessness), historical events (the war in Iraq, the events of 9/11) and attitudes concerning politics and the environment. The poems are filled with sensory images, engaged in the real world, often ironic or simply off-the-wall, and their tone ranges from deeply sad, as in a requiem for Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, to the wildly funny, as in Brief Communications from My widowed Mother.
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The Imaginary Lover
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
• Winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award presented by the Poetry Society of AmericaWith The Imaginary Lover, Alicia Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New York Times Book Review, aptly describes this book: "intimate rather than remote, passionate rather than distant, defying divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader." To read her poems is to "discover not only more of what it means to be a woman but more of what it means to be human."
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Spilled and Gone
Poems
by Jessica Greenbaum
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as "the ocean on a shiny day," and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium "might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists."
At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of "the good against the violence" the speaker asks, "why can't the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can't the shriek /of the girls in summer waves . . . / be the call and response of all people living on the earth?" A descendant of the New York school and the second wave, Greenbaum "spills" details that she simultaneously replaces-through the spiraling revelations only poems with an authentic life-force of humanism can nurture.
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Casualty Reports
Poems
by Martha Collins
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Stylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins's eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book. She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal-first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present. Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.
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Shadow Ball
New and Selected Poems
by Charles Harper Webb
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
An accessible new and selected collection of poems for poetry insiders and general readers. Powerful, passionate, humorous, and often complex, yet fun to read. They go down easy, but pack a whallop.
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Long for This World
New And Selected Poems
by Ronald Wallace
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Long for This World features the best of Ronald Wallace's work from his previous collections of poetry-Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks (1981), Tunes for Bears to Dance To (1983), People and Dog in the Sun (1987), The Makings of Happiness (1991), Time's Fancy (1994),and The Uses of Adversity (1998)-along with a generous selection of twenty-six new poems. If Wallace's recent poems sometimes seem darker and deeper, more meditative and complex, less sanguine about the tragedies of daily life, they never sacrifice the comic sense, the synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, and the sensory immediacy that have become his hallmarks.
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Jackknife
New and Selected Poems
by Jan Beatty
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and collisions of over twenty years of work. She moves from first-person narratives to poems that straddle the page in fragments, to lines that sprawl with long lines of train tracks. Always landing in meaning, we are inside the body-not in a confessional voice, not autobiography-but arriving through the expanded, exploded image of many stories and genders.
The new poems leap imagistically from the known world to the purely imagined, as in the voice in "Abortion with Gun Barrel": "I am the counselor,/there are cracks in the barrel of the gun/there is aiming/shots of sorrow-/ shots of light." Commitment to a rabid feminist voice continues, but arrival has a new ring to it, with beginnings rescripted: "I am a bastard./I walk around in this body of mine."
Beatty's fascination with the highway and the breakout West jackknifes at the crossroads of the brutal and the white plains of loss-the body torn down and resurrected in the twenty first century.
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The Wall
by Ilan Stavans
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry
The Wall is a poetic exploration-across time, space, and language, real as well as metaphorical-of the U.S.-Mexican wall dividing the two civilizations, of similar walls (Jerusalem, China, Berlin, Warsaw, etc.) in history, and of the act of separating people by ideology, class, race, and other subterfuges. It is an indictment of hateful political rhetoric. In the spirit of Virgil's Aeneid and Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Master, it gives voice in symphonic fashion to an assortment of participants (immigrants, border patrol, soldiers, activists, presidents, people dead and alive) involved in the debate on walls. It brings in elements of literature and pop culture, fashion and cuisine. Poetry becomes a tool to explore raw human emotions in all its extremes.
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Music for a Wedding
by Lauren Clark
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The poems in Lauren Clark's debut book, Music for a Wedding, move fluidly and unforgettably between the rituals of monogamy, death, loneliness, and the body in search of what might last forever. In the abandonment of those who die and those who leave, Clark's speakers are orphic in their use of song as a mode of enduring the hours. Like sybils, Clark's poems make the entrails of what's left behind luminous, even if what is presented is darkness, "that low velvet we make / within ourselves". Their poetry is at once free of the formalities associated with lyric poetry and full of its own novel shapes that only Clark could devise. Their poetry queers our understanding of poetics and what a book of poems can be by dwelling in intimate corners of the self that may seem otherwise insensate without their taking us in to witness such depths. In Clark's hands, the whole of the world--in poetry and on the ground--is preternatural, requiring of us dedication and devotion. But not to the usual rituals of mourning and prayer. Rather, "darkness is to remind [us] what [we] could not see before", that in the absence of being with others, the only true devotion left is grief.
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The Now
Poems
by Albert Goldbarth
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The Now describes the unique, and sometimes baffling, moment in which we live, a time defined by an immediate future of online wonderments, fake news, multiple personalities, data economy, gene modification, and the rest of the exciting-and-yet-ominous "technology culture," even as it's a time when the urge to memorialize the past-to sing elegiacally-seems more important than ever.
Between poems that consider the disappearance of language in an age of digital/binary communication, and poems that mourn the disappearance of fellow poets and artists, this collection attempts to stand on a nano-second that looks both backward and forward in time: the ever-shifting "now."