Anne Pitkin's third book, But Still, Music, spans her childhood as a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South to the period of her grown daughter's death. The poems visit the disquieting contradictions of a southern childhood marked by honeysuckle and lightning bugs and the racist culture that was the air she breathed
Pitkin's evocative reflections...are moments of time captured in the amber of poetic wordsmithing... The powerful, highly recommended collection that is But Still, Music should ideally be made part of any discussion group interested in contemporary poetry reflecting place, time, and life monuments. It doesn't just narrate. It sings. -Diane Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
These are Anne Pitkin's interrogations of Loss, her moments alone with the Whirlwind that sweeps through human lives and systematically takes all that we love and cherish away from us. With fierce intelligence, humor, grace and great skill, Pitkin offers these haunting poems as her response.
-Jesse Glass, ed. Ahadada Press
But Still, Music by Anne Pitkin truly is a beautiful poetry collection. Rich in imagery, emotion, and passion, these poems are exceptionally composed. -Theresa Kadair, Seattle Book Review
There's a fearlessness in the poems of Anne Pitkin's But Still, Music... Nothing is off limits, and that's part of the bravery of this collection... -Ed Harkness, The Law of the Unforeseen
Full of warnings, arguments, and reckonings, Anne Pitkin's But, Still Music attempts to move beyond a mindset "pretend[ing] all is well," whether in home, community, nation, or world... "It's a long story," she admits, how we eventually come to understand the past; how, in time, we see through perspectives not our own; and how we find mercy, acceptance, perhaps even redemption, as we move farther and more truthfully "into our broken-open world." -Jeff Hardin, Watermark
