Pitt Poetry Series

Imperial is a collection of poems, both serious and hilarious, ranging in subject matter from marriage, divorce, popular culture, to the pitfalls, perils, and predicaments of middle-aged, middle-class, mid-American suburban life.

This book by a major American poet is for poetry readers at all levels, academic and non-academic. It is a sequence of poems that will surprise and delight readers—in the voices of an old woman full of memories, a glamorous tulip, and an earthy dog who always has the last word.

Winner of the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Keeper is a book of lyric poems concerned with relationships of different sorts—with the natural world, with people and animals, and with the unseen and unknown.

Read a review on Keeper from the Valparaiso Poetry Review

Read a review of Keeper by Judith Kitchen, excerpted from the Winter 2014 issue of Georgia Review

Now, Now is concerned with questions of time and memory: how our perceptions are shaped, moment by moment, within the continuous meeting of past and future—of what happened, and what has not yet happened, but will.

Winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize in PoetrySelected by Arthur Sze

Winner of the 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation

Hyperboreal leverages the power of language and lyric as its poems contend with issues of Inuit cultural and biological extinction.

“These are enormously arresting, odd, wryly humorous, gripping poems. And the variety of subject matter is astounding. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed reading a book so much.”—David Budbill

“Reading Jeffrey McDaniel’s gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head.”—Major Jackson

The revised collection of Larry Levis poems selected by David St. John. Each of Levis’s books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books.

“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

The Switching/Yard deals with the horizontal worlds of the birth table, the continuum of gender roles, and the head-on landscape of power and home as seen through the train yards of the West.

Daisy Fried’s third poetry collection is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, whether watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, or trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, or yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender . . . She tells their stories with savage energy, wit, humor and political engagement.

In Translations from the Flesh, Elton Glaser’s poems are driven by the powerful engines of love and desire, giving voice to those deep pressures that most move us, body and soul: “I put my native tongue / To work, open to / The dark instincts of ecstasy.”

Blowout is both a celebration and mourning of romantic love—the blowout of a party, as well as the sudden rupture of a front tire.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. In The Government of Nature, Afaa Michael Weaver explores the trauma of his childhood—including sexual abuse—using a “cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism.” Weaver is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body.

Winner of the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Appetite is a book of poetry that explores identity, particularly masculinity, through the lenses of popular culture, relationships, and place.