University of Pittsburgh Press
Dragstripping
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Dragstripping

Poems

By Jan Beatty
In her eighth brilliant collection, Beatty once again proves herself a skilled master poet who sings of loss, grief, and trauma––but she also whispers a refrain of dynamic resolve: ‘Now I’m a heart without a head, walking. / I don’t need to be right–– / I just need it to be worth it . . .’
Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
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Dragstripping, Jan Beatty’s seventh collection of poems, takes readers to the literal dragstrip, the metaphorical dragstrip of the body, and the strip club, where the ecstatic is rescripted and where women disappear and reappear in the crosscut of gender. Transgressing into and out of poetic form, Beatty writes the fractured landscape of the unknown woman, breaking rules of grammar and subverting expected speech, mixing the real and unreal, and finding elation in a strange and shifting land.

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Jan Beatty writes at full throttle, a plunge into the self without flinching. These poems are highways, the finish lines smoking with ‘the truth that drags and bitters.’ Stories stripped raw. Brave, honest, death-defying, Beatty’s poetry roars.

Sandra Cisneros, author of Woman without Shame

Jan Beatty has written a wildly associative and resolutely secular rebel’s ‘lives of the saints’—one in which her love for rock and the blues is contiguous with her working-class roots, and in which familial, communal, and sexual love coalesce into unforgettable portraits of democratic life on the brink of revelation. You’ll find no stick-figure pieties or fool’s gold politics here. Everything the poet sees, she sees with the precise eye of passion.

Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch

September, 2024

isbn : 9780822967279

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about the author

Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently The Body Wars and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, which won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Prize. Beatty has worked as a waitress, in abortion clinics, and in maximum-security prisons and is professor emerita at Carlow University, where she directed the MFA and creative writing programs and the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.

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Jan Beatty