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: 80
ISBN: 9780822958130
Pub Date: 09 Mar 2003
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Song of Thieves delves into issues of racial identity and politics, the immigrant experience, and the search for "home" and family histories. In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780822957973
Pub Date: 12 Feb 2003
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Written in the spaces between otherness and brotherhood, Otherhood combines traditional lyricism with experimentalism, passionate engagement with cold-eyed investigation, and personal details with a depersonalized distance to create a new poetic synthesis.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780822957935
Pub Date: 26 Jan 2003
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Edited and with an Afterword by David St. JohnWhen Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as \u201cthe most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. .
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822957874
Pub Date: 24 Nov 2002
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822957898
Pub Date: 06 Oct 2002
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Rouge Pulp explores notions of body and beauty, birth and death, in a contemporary America driven by its contradictions: material plenty and spiritual lack. Dorothy Barresi writes about strippers, hair salons, cancer, good credit ratings, cockfights, childbirth, maternal love, war. Her poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822957867
Pub Date: 25 Sep 2002
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Winner of the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry PrizeRunner-up, Society of Midland Authors 2002 Poetry PrizeGabriel Gudding’s poems not only defend against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself. These poems sometimes nestle in the lowest regions of the body, and depict invective, donnybrooks, chase scenes, and the abuse of animals, as well as the indignities and bumblings of the besotted, the lustful, the annoyed, and the stupid.In short, Gudding seeks to reclaim the lowbrow.
Dangerous, edgy, and dark, this is an innovative writer unafraid to attack the unremitting high seriousness of so much poetry, laughing with his readers as he twists the elegiac lyric "I" into a pompous little clown.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822957881
Pub Date: 24 Jul 2002
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Winner of the 2001 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry Selected by Marilyn Chin A poet with an artist’s eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp’s "terribly surreal" life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover’s—or a mother’s—secrets, Jacobik's poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780822957799
Pub Date: 21 Feb 2002
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Hard-hitting, sophisticated, lyrical exploration of the meaning of the body. Questions icons and invokes taboos.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780822957805
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2002
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations.
Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner’s "Meep! Meep!" to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young’s poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822957683
Pub Date: 06 Dec 2001
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Joanie Mackowski’s debut collection of poetry is meditative, vivid, sometimes weird. Turning an idiosyncratic eye to the inhabitants of zoos and fish tanks, cafes and cemeteries, she illuminates details that make the familiar seem strange. An egret stands "still as a glass of milk"; iceberg lettuce is a "vegetable leviathan" that "extends beneath the dinner table / an unseen, monstrous green"; a bald eagle may "love a jet?
— / or worship them all, or mock them, rigid / freaks that never linger."
Format: Paperback
Pages: 136
ISBN: 9780822957706
Pub Date: 18 Oct 2001
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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.
"
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822957690
Pub Date: 02 Aug 2001
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize2002 finalist in poetry, Society of Midland AuthorsQuan Barry’s stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by The Matrix.Asylum is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced—both real and fictional.
In "some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked" the piano player from Casablanca is fleshed out in ways the film didn’t allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems.Barry engages with the world—the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war—but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual’s existence in relation to a higher truth, whether examining rituals or questioning, "Where is it written that we should want to be saved?" Ultimately, Asylum finds a haven by not looking away.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780822957492
Pub Date: 02 Mar 2001
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
This collection spans twenty-five years in the career of this highly regarded poet. It features poems from the books Stars, Calling the Dead,When There Are No Secrets, and Against Dreaming, along with seventeen new poems.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
ISBN: 9780822957614
Pub Date: 02 Mar 2001
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
Kathleen Norris has touched readers throughout America with her thoughtful and provocative memoirs of faith: Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. She is equally admired for her poetry of engagement with the spiritual world and its landscapes. Journey includes poems from three previous books spanning thirty years, along with a generous selection of new work that continues her radically individual celebration of the sacredness of life.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780822957621
Pub Date: 22 Feb 2001
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
There’s no predicting a Denise Duhamel poem, except that it might be about something you’ve never seen in a poem before: Mr. Donut, Rodney King, or nude beaches; Gertrude Stein, phone sex, or the Girl Scouts. Poems from The Woman with Two Vaginas, a book that was censored when it first appeared, are based on Inuit folklore.
How the Sky Fell offers revisionist fairy tales, and the poems from Kinky are inspired by Barbie dolls. In her new work, Duhamel suffers postmodern angst when using the “therapeutic I.” Denise Duhamel has startled readers of American poetry with work that pirouettes on a tightrope above the personal and the political, the spoken word and the page, the irreverent and the sacred. Queen for a Day showcases poems from her five previous collections, along with new work.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822957638
Pub Date: 22 Feb 2001
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Description:
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.
