Mad River - University of Pittsburgh Press

Mad River

In every poem, she keeps her fury contained, but omnipresent, so that it resembles a cornered dog's warning growl, yet she hints of happier possibilities.

Booklist

Winner, 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
“In every poem, she keeps her fury contained, but omnipresent, so that it resembles a cornered dog’s warning growl, yet she hints of happier possibilities.”—Booklist

More Praise

Raw, energetic, gritty, risky, sexy, and real. . . . The power of these short narratives is often cumulative, building a vision of the world seen through the eyes of a wanderer, a woman, a waitress.

Dorianne Laux

I would shout from my back porch 'Read these poems!' (if I knew you would listen); they are funny and smart, lush and tough-minded, wacky in that particular American wackiness, graceful, burning, alive.

Bruce Weigl

Her poems speak to us head-on, with courage and a contemporaneous eloquence.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Beatty does offer deeply visceral and sensory work, especially in the second and third sections of this three-part book . . . she risks relative boldness and deep emotional commitment, disregarding political correctness in respect for this less readily sanitized realm of experience.

Publishers Weekly

Table of Contents

Sample

64 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

January, 1996

isbn : 9780822955702

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

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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