Pitt Poetry Series
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series Editors: Terrance Hayes, New York University; Nancy Krygowski, Carnegie Mellon University; Jeffrey McDaniel, Sarah Lawrence College
Since its inception in 1967, the Pitt Poetry Series has been a vehicle for America’s finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco, Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Ross Gay, Etheridge Knight, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others. Throughout its 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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822961246
Pub Date: 15 Sep 2010
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822961215
Pub Date: 10 Sep 2010
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780822960799
Pub Date: 06 Aug 2010
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780822960607
Pub Date: 16 Apr 2010
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
"Sometimes we have questions that seem to defy answers or even suppositions but then we find Love and Strange Horses to help us map out a course to continue loving life. A really wonderful, thoughtful read by an intriguing new voice."—Nikki Giovanni
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822960775
Pub Date: 05 Mar 2010
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
"As always with a Bob Hicok book, fascinating and a book you sort of can’t help but pick up and suddenly, two hours later, find yourself having read straight through. I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work."—Corduroy Books
Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
ISBN: 9780822960591
Pub Date: 05 Mar 2010
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
“I have long believed that Lynn Emanuel is one of the most innovative and subversive poets now writing in America. Her aesthetic and artistic choices consistently invoke a complex hybrid poetics that radically reimagines the shape of our poetic discourse. The brilliant, shattering, and disturbing poems of Noose and Hook are not only wry critiques of recent poetic and cultural activity in this country but also compelling signposts to what yet might be possible in our future.
This is Lynn Emanuel's most exquisite and powerful book yet.”—David St. John
Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
ISBN: 9780822960553
Pub Date: 15 Jan 2010
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
“Joanie Mackowski's hypnotizing View from a Temporary Window is filled with Kafka-like transformations and metamorphoses and haunted by a sense of the body's strangeness. She writes in a relaxed and lucid manner that pays scrupulous attention to both the imaginary and the real, and to what is uncanny in each.”—John L.
Koethe
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822960515
Pub Date: 15 Oct 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Alicia Ostriker seizes the opportunity to take us where too few poets have been able to take us: into a domain of what our fabulists like to call the \u201cgolden years.\u201d as we live longer, we become inevitably curious about the actual texture of these late years, curious about what happens in the soul. Out of that curiosity is a new kind of poetry born, an elderstile that has passion and irony, wisdom, folly, clarity and tenderness.
In her keen engagement with the self and the world, Ostriker offers us a voice and a perspective that explore the territory of seventy and beyond.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
ISBN: 9780822960423
Pub Date: 01 Oct 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822960409
Pub Date: 31 Aug 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Temper is at once violent and controlled, unflinching and unforgiving in temperament. The poems are mercilessly recursive, placing pressure on the lyric as a mode of both the elegiac and the ecstatic. The result is an enforced silence, urgent with grief.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822960416
Pub Date: 20 Jul 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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\u2019s prescription for a life of emotional-spiritual bankruptcy, reaching toward an ever-elusive glimmer on the horizon.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822960362
Pub Date: 10 Apr 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Drawing upon intersections of astronomy and mathematics, history, literature, and lived experience, the poems in Open Interval locate the self in the interval between body and name.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822960300
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
“An artist who moonlights as a dentist. A worm who's eternal. A farmer who milks his cow to death.
Not to mention the guy with a belly button for an eye. Russell Edson, self-named Little Mr. Prose Poem, returns with See Jack, a book of fractured fairy tales, whose impeccable logic undermines logic itself, a book that champions what he has called elsewhere 'the dark uncomfortable metaphor.' 'What better way to die,' he writes in the final prose poem, 'than waiting for the fat lady to sing in the make-believe of theater, where nothing's real, not the fat lady, not even death . . . ' See Jack may be Edson's best book yet—proof that his imaginative powers keep growing. What a deliciously scary thought!” —Peter Johnson
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822960171
Pub Date: 11 Feb 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822960218
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
ISBN: 9780822960331
Pub Date: 30 Jan 2009
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
In 1970, as the war in Vietnam was heating up, Ostriker was awaiting the birth of her son. On April 30, President Nixon announced the bombing of Cambodia. On May 14, four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University.
The poems in this collection confront Ostriker’s personal tumult as she considered the world she had brought her son into.
