Pitt Poetry
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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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Bringing the Shovel Down
by Ross Gay
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Bringing the Shovel Down maps the long and arduous process of being inculcated with the mythologies of state and power, the ramifications of that inculcation (largely, the loss of our humanity in the service of maintaining those mythologies), and finally, what it might mean, what it might provide us, if we were to transform those myths. The book, finally, has one underlying question: How might we better love one another?
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Ringer
Poems
by Rebecca Lehmann
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that women's identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmann's poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a "junk" or "sad" pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America.
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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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For the Scribe
by David Wojahn
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
For the Scribe, the ninth collection by award-winning poet David Wojahn, continues his explorations of the interstices between the public and the private, the historical and the personal. Poems of recollection and elegy commingle and conjoin with poems which address larger matters of historical and ecological import. The subjects of extinction and apocalypse figure prominently and obsessively in these pages, both in short lyrics and in several lengthy sequences. The poems also evidence the mastery of technique for which Wojahn is renowned, whether he is writing in fixed forms or in free verse. For the Scribe is the most ambitious and searching collection thus far from a poet who has been a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the William Carlos Williams Book Award.
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Insomnia Diary
by Bob Hicok
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Bob Hicok's poems are often edgy, brazen, and funny. They're just as likely to be soulful, reflective, and provocative. Usually at the same time. As Hicok builds toward the punchline of a poem set up with his characteristic wit, he zigs into seriousness. A thoughtful meditation that builds to a moment of epiphany zags into comedy. Hicok's fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill the pages of Insomnia Diary. The fourth collection of poetry from this former automotive die designer delivers more of the cunning brilliance that has become Hicok's hallmark.
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Flying At Night
Poems 1965-1985
by Ted Kooser
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006, Ted Kooser is one of America's masters of the short metaphorical poem. Dana Gioia has remarked that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation.In Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, Kooser has selected poems from two of his earlier works, Sure Signs (1980) and One World at a Time (1985). Taken together or read one at a time, these poems clearly show why William Cole, writing in the Saturday Review, called Ted Kooser "a wonderful poet," and why Peter Stitt, writing in the Georgia Review, proclaimed him "a skilled and cunning writer. . . . An authentic 'poet of the American people.'"
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Flop Era
Poems
by Lara Egger
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Flop Era reckons with the complications of being human, and therefore, with the consequences of being fundamentally flawed. It contends with failed potential and the certain uncertainty of the future, while interrogating the past for clues that might explain why, as the speaker bemoans, "there are never enough nails in the coffin of poor choices." While Egger throws confetti on the quotidian, she disarms the reader with earnestness and vulnerability. Rich in metaphor, affable and self-deprecating, the poems in Flop Era shine a spotlight on regret, infidelity, the feminine ideal, fear of death, and fear of insignificance.
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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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Two and Two
by Denise Duhamel
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Denise Duhamel's much anticipated new collection begins with a revisionist tale-Noah is married to Joan of Arc-in a poem about America's often flawed sense of history. Throughout Two and Two, doubles abound: Noah's animals; Duhamel's parents as Jack and Jill in a near-fatal accident; an incestuous double sestina; a male/female pantoum; a dream and its interpretation; and translations of advertisements from English to Spanish. In two Mobius strip poems (shaped like the Twin Towers), Duhamel invites her readers to get out their scissors and tape and transform her poems into 3-D objects. At the book's center is "Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted," a gathering of journal entries, personal e-mails, and news reports into a collage of witness about September 11. A section of "Mille et un sentiments," modeled on the lists of Herve Le Tellier, Georges Perec, and George Brainard, breaks down emotions to their most basic levels, their 1,001 tiny recognitions. The book ends with "Carb- Frescos," written in the form of an art guidebook from the 24th century. Innovative and unpretentious, Duhamel uses twice the language usually available for poetry. She culls from the literary and nonliterary, from the Bible and product warning labels, from Woody Allen films and Hong Kong action movies-to say difficult things with astonishing accuracy. Two and Two is second to none.
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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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The Red Line
by Betsy Sholl
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
• Winner of the 1991 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry
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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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Hour of the Ox
by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of The 2015 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Selected by Crystal Ann Williams
Hour of the Ox examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.
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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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Nude Descending an Empire
by Sam Taylor
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in-with all its crises, madness, and modernity-and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast as the fulfillment of a long history of violence, domination, lies, and alienation-in one word, empire-and the book suggests that a livable future requires that we wholly inhabit our body-heart-mind and discover a new paradigm.
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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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Boy With Thorn
by Rickey Laurentiis
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation-the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself-confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
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Eternity & Oranges
by Christopher Bakken
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
We'd not slept in days, or else we were/ still sleeping-who could tell?" someone asks in the opening poem of Eternity & Oranges. The voices we encounter in this book speak on the verge of disappearance, from places marked by disintegration and terror. Christopher Bakken's poems are acts of conjuring. They move from the real political landscapes of Greece, Italy, and Romania, into more surreal spaces where history comes alive and the summoned dead speak. In the formally diverse long poem, "Kouros/Kore," but also in this book's terse and harrowing dream songs, Bakken writes with devastating force, at every turn "Guilty of the crime of praise" while "begging for an antidote to beauty.
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The Uses of Adversity
by Ronald Wallace
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
The Uses of Adversity - titled after the line from As You Like It, "Sweet are the uses of adversity" - is a collection of one hundred sonnets cobining the craftiness of traditional form with the effortlessness of free verse. The language is often richly textured and musical, often plain spoken and conversational, but always witty and accessible. The subject matter ranges widely from Rootie Kazootie and Froggy the Gremlin, Howdy Doody and Elvis Presley, to Christopher Columbus, Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Kevorkian; from Donald Duck, Mandrake the Magician, Li'l Abner and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, to Shakespeare, H.P. Lovecraft, Transtromer, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche; from the tradtional themes of lyrics - love (both sacred and profane), death, the changing of the seasons, marriage, birth, divorce, childhood, sex, religion,art, the natural world, illness - to the most unexpected and quirky contemporary narratives.The title sequence, which explores a father's illness and death, is both elegiac and celebratory, evoking the conflictual bonds in any father-son relationship. In these sonnets, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Wallace once again proves himself to be one of our most versatile and affirmative poets.
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If One of Us Should Fall
by Nicole Terez Dutton
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
"Nicole Terez Dutton's fierce and formidable debut throbs with restless beauty and a lyrical undercurrent that is both empowered and unpredictable. Every poem is unsettling in that delicious way that changes and challenges the reader. There is nothing here that does not hurtle forward."
-Patricia Smith
Chosen by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association as a 2013 Honor Book Winner for poetry.
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Listening Long and Late
by Peter Everwine
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
"What a rich array of music lies within Listening Long and Late. With refreshing authenticity, Everwine weds playfulness to practice, lyricism to narrative, pathos to the ordinary. Indeed, he has listened 'long and late' to the music of such venerable masters as Tu Fu, the hidden genius on the street, and the anonymous Aztec poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Everwine writes with the same 'deified heart' that divines the mystery of his quotidian subjects in a language that is at once plain and poetic. His own work seamlessly segues into his translations from the Hebrew and Nahuatl, as if all the poems belonged to the same poet, which they in fact do, as the glorious multitudes of Peter Everwine, one of the masters of our age."-Chard deNiord
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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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Zinc Fingers
Poems A to Z
by Peter Meinke
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Peter Meinke writes with the wisdom of a prophet. His poems speak truth with the self-assurance of a man willing to laugh at himself and, by extension, he invites us to laugh at ourselves as well. In this, his eleventh collection, he is in his element, writing poems of humor and sadness, taking readers to a place they had only a vague hope of ever reaching.
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The Volcano Sequence
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Bold, erotic, spiritual collection of poetry from a well-respected poet and critic, whose previous two books were both National Book Award finalists.
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Ka-Ching!
by Denise Duhamel
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Ka-Ching! is a book of poems that explores America's obsession with money. It also includes a crown of sonnets about e-bay, sestinas on the subjects of Sean Penn and the main characters of fairytales, a pantoum that riffs on a childhood riddle, and a villanelle inspired by bathroom grafitti.
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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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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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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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Albatross
by Dore Kiesselbach
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Dore Kiesselbach's second collection Albatross views the events of September 11th as a physicist might examine high-energy particles in a supercollider. In the book's central section, Kiesselbach, who worked three blocks from the World Trade Center and was an eyewitness, deconstructs the cultural hyperbole of that extraordinary day in a series of intimate portraits that dovetail elsewhere with a wider examination of violence in the everyday lives of individuals, families, and nations. While neither blaming victims, nor succumbing to despair, the book urges reflection on the roles we each play in our own harm. Like its namesake, the human-powered aircraft flown across the English Channel in 1979, Albatross invites readers to push forward into headwinds-public and private-and make for the far shore.
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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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Paper Anniversary
by Bobby Rogers
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
"There is something in American poetry that might be called the book of the small town or, equally, the tale of the good family; or, if you like, the American Grafitti Suite. Poems that discover life's bonuses in new love, wise parents, old books, venerable nature, and the mysteries of all that endures in the face of the viciousness no life escapes-are, well, worth the wait. That's how I feel about Paper Anniversary. His poems are full of the best news, the kind the soul, as W. C. Williams attested, can get nowhere better than in the life of the lively mind. I think any reader will find this an auspicious, welcome arrival." -Dave Smith
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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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Black Swan
by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Winner of the 2001 Cave Canem PrizeSelected by Marilyn NelsonFinalist, 2003 Paterson Poetry Prize"Imagine Leda black-" begins Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's exciting new collection of poems. Mixing vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, she gives voice to silenced women past and present.In Van Clief-Stefanon's powerful voice, last night's angry words "puffed / into the dark room like steam / punching through the thick surface / of cooking grits." She remembers a child's innocence "lost / in the house where I learned the red rug / against my chest, my knees / my tongue, . . . ." Black Swan is filled with pain, loss, hope, and the promise of salvation.
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Imperial Liquor
Poems
by Amaud Jamaul Johnson
Part of the Pitt Poetry series
Imperial Liquor is a chronicle of melancholy, a reaction to the monotony of racism. These poems concern loneliness, fear, fatigue, rage, and love; they hold fatherhood held against the vulnerability of the black male body, aging, and urban decay. Part remembrance, part swan song for the Compton, California of the 1980s, Johnson examines the limitations of romance to heal broken relationships or rebuild a broken city. Slow Jams, red-lit rooms, cheap liquor, like seduction and betrayal-what's more American? This book tracks echoes, rides the residue of music "after the love is gone."
Smokey
the most dangerous men
in my neighborhood
only listened to love songs
to reach those notes
a musicologist told me
a man essentially cuts
his own throat. some nights
even now, i'll hear a falsetto
and think i should run
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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.