Pitt Poetry
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Be Holding
A Poem
by Ross Gay
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and '80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia '76ers, as well as over his career in both the NBA and ABA. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J's famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.
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The Land of Bliss
by Cathy Song
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Cathy Song's fourth collection of poetry unveils glimpses of the elusive but ever-present power of wisdom and compassion. Recognizing that we have the ability to create our own misery as well as our own bliss, she finds the unexpected in broken lives, despair, and even seemingly joyous occasions. Song's poems are often, like a handful of water, "cold and impossibly / clear, unlike anything / you've ever held before."
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Primer
by Aaron Smith
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief?
Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive.
Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world.
The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.
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First Course in Turbulence
by Dean Young
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Finalist for ForeWord Magazine's 1999 Poetry Book of the YearWith rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young's latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.
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Best Bones
by Sarah Rose Nordgren
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Best Bones is a house. When you walk around the rooms of the house, you overhear the desires and griefs of a family, as well as the unresolved concerns of lingering ghosts. The various voices in the house struggle against the family roles and social identities that they must wear like heavy garments-mother, father, wife, husband, sister, brother, servant, and master. All these voices crave unification; they want to join themselves into one whole sentient being, into "a mansion steering itself."
The poems in Best Bones also explore the experience of living in a physical body, and how the natural world intersects with manmade landscapes and technologies. In it, mother has a reset button, servants blend into the furniture, and a doctor patiently oversees the pregnancy of the earth.
In these poems, the body is a working machine, a repository of childhood myth and archetype, and a window to the spiritual world. The poems strive to be visceral on the level of dream, or of a story that is half remembered and half fabricated.
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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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Sure Signs
New and Selected Poems
by Ted Kooser
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The publication of Ted Kooser's Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems is a literary event of major importance. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accessible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry.
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A Revised Poetry of Western Philosophy
by Daniel Grandbois
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Bertrand Russell finds himself in purgatory, tumbling through literal representations of the worlds of ideas he examined in his classic text, A History of Western Philosophy, gulping much-needed air, for example, from Empedocles' bucket. Mistaking his erection for a planted flag, he declares the place Platonopolis, attempts to calculate his Pythagorean number, kills God (though he later sees evidence of His resurrection), and, Rousseau-like, turns away from reason and civilization, favoring the noble savage, only to march back into the concrete jungle as one of Nietzsche's savage nobles. In the end, however, he is all jumbled up and clucking like Einstein's cuckoo clock, until he perceives philosophy as music, hears its arguments as a symphonic procession of the electrochemical pulses produced within three-pound lumps-lumps self-amalgamated from the vomitus of stars-and revises his History.
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Sound of the Ax
Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford
by Various Authors
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Sound of the Ax brings together for the first time over four hundred aphorisms and twenty-six aphoristic poems by one of America's most essential poets of the twentieth century. Many readers are familiar with the trenchant nature of William Stafford's poems, with lines such as "Justice will take us millions of intricate moves" and "Your job is to find what the world is trying to be," but have never had the opportunity to read a sustained selection from the thousands of wise, witty, and penetrating statements he created in over forty years of daily writing in his journal. In keeping with Stafford's varied interests, the aphorisms in Sound of the Ax explore many topics-war and peace, involvement, aging, appearances, fear, egotism, writing, nature, animals, suffering, faith, living an ethical life, and so on-with his incisive view. The poems are either made up entirely or primarily aphorisms, and range from the well-known "Things I Learned Last Week" to some never before collected. Readers will find much to enjoy and to think about here, and will return over and over to Sound of the Ax for inspiration, pleasure, and wisdom from an author noted for his integrity and mindful living.
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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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Imperfect Present
Poems
by Sharon Dolin
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the "Oblique Strategies" of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.
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Keeper
by Kasey Jueds
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The poems in Keeper explore, and long for, intimacy: with nature, with others, with the unknown. They delve into purely dark spaces (the insides of birdhouses and mailboxes, caves of prehistoric paintings) and in-between places, searching out, as Paul Eluard put it, the other world inside this one, pointing to the pervasive sensuality that connects all beings, and to the fact that essential goodness and sorrow often walk hand in hand.
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Let's All Die Happy
by Erin Adair-Hodges
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The poems in Let's All Die Happy explore apostasy, concerned with what happens after the beliefs and institutions which promised fulfillment leave us empty instead. Through a darkly humorous lens, it also examines a patriarchal culture in which women are defined through their relationship to others and how this inheritance weighs heavily not only on the lives we lead but shapes what life it is possible to even imagine having. Ultimately, the poems push against these containers, burning through the stages of a woman's life until there's nothing left but to invent what's next, finding both loneliness and liberation in this reclamation.
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The Thin Wall
by Martha Rhodes
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Past Praise for Martha Rhodes's Mother Quiet:
"The aim of poetry (and the higher kind of thriller) is to be unexpected and memorable. So a poem about death might treat it in a way that combines the bizarre and the banal: the Other Side as some kind of institution-a creepy hospital, an officious hotel or retirement home. Martha Rhodes takes such an approach in 'Ambassadors to the Dead,' from her abrupt, unsettling, artfully distorted, indelible new book Mother Quiet. Blending the matter-of-fact with the surreal, as a way of comprehending the stunning, final reality, Rhodes is an inheritor of Emily Dickinson's many poems on the same subject."
-Robert Pinsky, Washington Post
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Blessing the Exoskeleton
Poems
by Andrew Hemmert
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Blessing the Exoskeleton is a southerner's book about Michigan. Written over a two-year period in Kalamazoo, Andrew Hemmert's poems address climate change, labor, love, and his attempts to live joyfully in a deteriorating world. Though the majority of these poems are narrative, they approach their stories in roundabout and slanted ways. A meditation on job seeking begets a story about the author's father attempting to catch an owl in a fishing net. A fire down the road from the author's apartment begets a meditation on telemarketing. Personal histories collide with headlines, resulting in poems that convey everyday experience and seek to praise it. Despite the northern cold and the tyranny of the news, Hemmert develops his own theories for navigating his life, finding beauty in an unfamiliar landscape and climate.
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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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The Double Truth
by Chard deNiord
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.
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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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She Didn't Mean to Do It
by Daisy Fried
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize The thirty-three narrative, linguistically-adventurous poems in She Didn't Mean To Do It range freely among styles and voices. Examining human emotions and behavior in all their contradictions, Daisy Fried turns a perceptive eye on those around her. Fried integrates metaphoric flights and idiosyncratic narrative, surprising us with the details-"I saw that the wisteria/in dusk its same color hung (heavier than/the breasts of stabbed and stabber ever would be)"-while her characters traipse across lines and pages. These are poems about human relationships, mostly romantic and sexual. They're also about jobs and work: urban, action-packed and socially aware.
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What We Did While We Made More Guns
by Dorothy Barresi
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The poems in What We Did While We Made More Guns investigate the place where economic failure meets a widening acculturation of violence-a kind of Great Acceleration of soul extinction set in this spectacularly uneasy moment in American history. Cutting, comic, sorrowful, at times terrified, at times resolute, the poems tilt along the high cliff's edge of identity anxiety and American moral uncertainty, where each of us plays our part in the business of dispossession or resistance. Building themselves out of jazzed-up verbal velocities and wounded (in)sincerity, the poems counsel resilience against all forms of battery, mortal, spiritual, financial. They are pattern-makers in the dark. They talk back to God. They take into themselves what cannot be taken back: the news that forty-six million Americans have "slipped" below the poverty line; that guns discharge monstrously banal virility; that a black woman pulled over for a routine traffic violation dies by strangulation in her jail cell; that we buy and sell the myth of the American Dream as though our lives depended on it.
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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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Red Sugar
by Jan Beatty
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In her third collection, Beatty travels inside the body to the blood that codes us, moving beyond the language of post-confessionialism into fourth-wave feminism, challenging notions of the "romantic" "and the "brutal" and how they exist within us and between us.
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Interrogation Palace
New and Selected Poems 1982-2004
by David Wojahn
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Interrogation Palace is a career-spanning selection of work from an important American poet, drawing upon each of David Wojahn's six previous collections and a substantial gathering of new work. Moving fluently from personal history to public history, and from high culture to popular culture, Wojahn's searching and restless poetry has been considerably acclaimed, both for the candor of its testimony and the authority of its formal invention. He is above all an elegiac poet, tender and ferocious by turns, whether mourning the loss of family and loved ones or the hopes and aspirations of the baby-boomer era. Interrogation Palace confirms David Wojahn's status as one of the most inventive, passionate, and ambitious figures of his generation.
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Eye of Water
by Amber Flora Thomas
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
The poems in Eye of Water are derived from the narrator’s experiences in what she calls her “waking.” She traces inspiration to “the beginning of myth, to Eve in the Garden of Eden” and states: “We could spend our lives unraveling the mistake and discover that life was one great big ‘chore,’ and inescapable. And the path is full of missteps and accidents because we cannot (or prefer not to) remember all that got us to that moment. My body seems to be a symptom of the past, so no matter who touches me, all the ghosts are waiting there. The ‘chore’ becomes how to survive despite the flaws of our humanness that makes us brutal at times.”
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Love on the Streets
Selected and New Poems
by Sharon Doubiago
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Love on the Streets is a selection from two of Doubiago's book-length poems, Hard Country and South America Mi Hija and from the collections Psyche Drives the Coast and Body and Soul, plus new poems. Hard Country takes place in 1976, on a journey across the U.S. with a lover, climaxing on the lake where his mother drowned herself when he was ten. South America Mi Hija is a journey the poet made with her 15 year-old daughter to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Psyche Drives the Coast are poems written while Doubiago lived mainly on the road, and in diverse, passionate communities of poets from Mendocino to the Canadian border. Body and Soul was written while she was a resident of Oregon, and the new poems are written from her present home in San Francisco.
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In Praise of Falling
by Cheryl Dumesnil
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The poems in this collection are the proverbial spring bulbs abandoned in the basement, growing toward a slim crack of sunlight. They are both aware of the limitations of social structures and forcefully committed to breaking out of those traps, urging toward a better way of living. The characters in these poems resist the twenty-first century's prescription for a life of emotional-spiritual bankruptcy, reaching toward an ever-elusive glimmer on the horizon.
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Star Journal
Selected Poems
by Christopher Buckley
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley's twenty previous collections, from 1980 through 2014. Buckley's poetry is unique in its use of current science and cosmology, recent facts and theories mixed in with a lyrical underpinning.
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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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Heaven & Earth Holding Company
by John Hodgen
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
"Heaven & Earth Holding Company contains a plentitude of delights. Like little stories told in the night, these poems are clear narratives crossed by mysterious shadows. And Hodgen's tone occupies a singular place at the intersection of funky wit and true feeling."-Billy Collins
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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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American Fanatics
by Dorothy Barresi
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
A book of contemporary poetry exploring the fine, shifting line between faith-secular and spiritual faith-and fanaticism in an insecure age, American Fanatics is a lyrical, pop-culture inflected meditation on democracy, morality, beauty, commerce, and the cost of falling dreams.
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Then, Suddenly--
by Lynn Emanuel
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Finalist for ForeWord Magazine's 1999 Poetry Book of the YearA reader and a writer don their respective roles and embark on the journey of a book. This is their story-ultimately a love story-darkly funny, mournful, testy. It is about a reader who at times presides over the page like a god, and at others follows the leash of the author's voice through the dark streets of the book like a dog, and it is about a writer of determined slipperiness. As we read, we think that each of us is The Reader, the one who knows the Real Story. But the more we think we understand, the more the story moves away from us-all is not what it seems.This eagerly awaited third volume by the poet whose work The New York Times described as "at once charmed and frightening" is a book of high-spirited subversiveness, a work of argument, seduction, and a relentless devotion to language. Then, Suddenly- bristles with the sound of the author's voice-insistent, vital, hilarious, and iconoclastic-tearing away at the confinement of the page and at the distance between the page and the reader. Emanuel's images are dazzling. She creates a performance that is fearsome and funny in its portrayal of the argument between the work of the text and the world of the body. The Gettsyburg Review has called her a writer of "exquisite craftsmanship" who can "strike from language . . . images chiseled clean as bas-relief." Then, Suddenly- is a book of spectacle and verve, part elegy, part vaudeville.
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All-Night Lingo Tango
by Barbara Hamby
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
This collection is a love letter to language with poems that are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who can make a new world out of nothing.
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Red Under the Skin
by Natasha Saje
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
• Winner of the 1995 Towson State University Prize for Literature • Winner of the 1993 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
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The Switching/Yard
by Jan Beatty
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In Jan Beatty's fourth collection, The Switching/Yard, she takes us through the ravaged landscape of the American West. In unflinching lines of burning lyric and relentless narrative, she forges the constructed body into movement. What is still stereotyped as the romantic journey-now becomes as scarred as the Rust Belt. What lives in our collective unconscious as the Golden West becomes almost surreal, as these poems snap that vision in half with extended description of ghost explorers.
We see the open truck cab, the farm workers on the corner waiting for pick-up; we see the speaker returning west to find the long-abandoned story of the birthfather. There is no stable landscape here except the horizontal action of moving through. Landscape becomes story. In this extended tale of the idea of family, we find stand-ins for the father in the form of a hit man, Jim Morrison, and ultimately the unyielding road takes the place of the body. The Switching/Yard is at once the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where gender routinely shifts and switches, and the actual switching yard of the trains that run the inevitable tracks of this book.
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Creature
Poems
by Marsha de la O
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Written during the last five years of the poet's father's life, Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can't be said by finding connection with other life forms: hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses, ravens, squid. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation.
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The Ocean Inside Kenji Takezo
by Rick Noguchi
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
For the young Kenji Takezo, the innocent surfer who inhabits this collection of poems, balance becomes more than just trying to stand on a wave. It is a way of surviving in a world as precarious as the ocean, a world constantly turning on itself.
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Domestic Interior
by Stephanie Brown
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In painting, a "domestic interior" depicts the inside of a house and its inhabitants going about their daily lives. The poems in Domestic Interior describe the private and sometimes secret spaces in our places of residence and the interior lives of those who live there. Marriage and parenthood, grief, spiritual renewal, community and country are subjects addressed with a satirical eye and emotional insight.
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Admit One: An American Scrapbook
by Martha Collins
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In Admit One: An American Scrapbook,Martha Collins relentlessly traces the history of scientific racism from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fairthrough the eugenics movement of the 1920s. Using a wide variety of documentary sources, including her Illinois grandfather's newspaper, Collins constructs a "scrapbook" of fragments, quotations, narrative passages, and lyrical riffs that reveal startling connections between the Fair, the Bronx Zoo, and ideas that culminated in anti-immigration, anti-miscegenation, and eugenic sterilization laws in 1924. Among the book's recurring elements are evolving portraits of the "exhibited" African Ota Benga, the sterilization victim Carrie Buck, and the eugenicist Madison Grant, whose reach extended to Nazi Germany. Following the practice begun in her book-length poem Blue Front and continued in her exploration of race in White Papers, Collins combines careful research with innovative poetic techniques to create an arresting account of a segment of American history that haunts us even today. Admit One is a brilliant, troubling, necessary read.
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Territorial
Poems
by Mira Rosenthal
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Territorial explores the bargains that women make to stay safe from violence. Set in a landscape of looming ecological ruin, the poems bear witness to the effects of drought on the California chaparral region and delve into difficult personal terrain to reveal patterns of abuse we inflict on the earth and each other. How can we emerge from a devastated landscape into a sense of healing and repair? Using the characteristics of violence-repetition and escalation-the collection connects subjects that range from the dawn of recorded sound to the mapping of myths onto constellations, the ecosystem of a leach pond, and the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz. In tracing the ways narratives of predation imprint onto the body, memory, environment, and future generations, Territorial finds resilience in the powers of language to reshape experience.
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Brain Camp
by Charles Harper Webb
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Powered by a fierce, compassionate intelligence, Brain Camp explores with clarity and vividness a wide spectrum of emotions-love to hate, tenderness to brutality-all from a perspective both universal yet distinctly Webb's. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a voice at once endearing and provocative, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as a mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order. These poems go down easy, but pack a wallop. As Robert Frost said poetry should do, Brain Camp "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
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Salt Pier
by Dore Kiesselbach
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Emotionally direct and visually all alike in column-shaped free verse, the poems in this debut from the Minneapolis-based Kiesselbach open up to show startling verbal skills, intellectual depths, and sensory complications. 'Beach Thanksgiving' wheels from seaside scenes into one, then another, sad memory: 'Fire's an assortment of sparks down the beach/ beside which your new family cooks./ Asked to bear a ring,/ you pulled and pulled at your hair.' For an elderly mother, once a gardener, 'Joy's bolted/ in her face to sorrow/ like a pair of shears.' Marital love in the present (Kiesselbach has a particular talent for love poems), what looks like abuse in the past, the cycle of green growing things, the cold of the north, and the warmth of the animal world all inform these investigations of confession and its discontents, of commitments given and withheld, sometimes through stark life story but more often, in a wonderful involution, through symbols contemplated at short remove-in turkeys, for example, whose unlikely dignity rebukes human discontents: 'In fall's/ ballroom they bow/ and straighten, straighten,/ bow, and finish/ with a salad course.'"-Publishers Weekly Winner of the 2011 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Salt Pier is a hypothesis about the capacity of language to gain traction on experience in such a way that memory blossoms and judgment is made whole.
Winner of the Poetry Society of America's Robert H. Winner Memorial Award
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Eve's Striptease
by Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
As its title proclaims, Eve's Striptease delivers a female voice that seeks to "find out for (her)self/ all the desires a body can hold." Through artful acts of revelation and concealment, these poems test experience against the notions of love and loss that tradition and religion have taught us. These narrative and lyric poems celebrate desire, marriage, and domestic life; they visit sexual terror and consider sickness and death. Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, this work suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Kasdorf writes of a life's migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing, sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them.
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Every Form of Ruin
Poems
by Erin Adair-Hodges
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
A rebuttal to Aeschylus's Oresteia, Every Form of Ruin posits the Erinyes' fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra's rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia's relegation to a footnoted sacrifice. A fierce and darkly funny examination of anger, these lyrical poems push back against silencing by playing witness to a world where the experiences of women, nonbinary, and femme-identifying people are too often ignored, their responses dismissed as hysterical. These poems are also investigations into the loneliness of midlife; the search for one's own self when that self has given its life to service. Every Form of Ruin counters our culture's erasure of women and resists the categorizations of maiden, mother, crone by blurring those distinctions through the creation of voices that are moved by rage and resistance.
BLACK THUMB
The dogwood was threatening
to swallow the back garden's light,
so I borrowed a chainsaw and gas.
Its last berries a memory of red, the fruit
bitter, tiny angry mangos in the mouth
of its killer. Nights my son chooses his father
to read him into silence, I practice not loving
anything. Less like learning than remembering.
As a child, I studied how to be a child.
I was given a doll to care for
but could never remember its name.
I left her face down everywhere.
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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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Waiting for the Light
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
What is it like living today in the chaos of a city that is at once brutal and beautiful, heir to immigrant ancestors "who supposed their children's children would be rich and free?" What is it to live in the chaos of a world driven by "intolerable, unquenchable human desire?" How do we cope with all the wars? In the midst of the dark matter and dark energy of the universe, do we know what train we're on? In this cornucopia of a book, Ostriker finds herself immersed in phenomena ranging from a first snowfall in New York City to the Tibetan diaspora, asking questions that have no reply, writing poems in which "the arrow may be blown off course by storm and returned by miracle."
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Trying to Surprise God
by Peter Meinke
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Trying to Surprise God is Peter Meinke's second book of poetry, and is characterized by an unusual and masterful range of effects, and by Meinke's unique wit and compassion.
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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.