Pitt Poetry Series

Winner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.Angela Ball’s lyrical, wry, and rueful poems float on a river of incongruities on which we may find Ron Popeil, Lord Byron, and Rudyard Kipling sharing the same raft; they create a fascinating commerce between the sublime and the ridiculous.

These poems, threaded by the teachings of Buddha, examine loss—the death of a loved one, the longing for a child, the yearning for another place and time—and the suffering such attempts transpire, but ultimately the poems are an affirmation that to be born into human life is our greatest opportunity to transform loss and sorrow into awakening joy.

Winner of the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Krygowski’s poems—often sad, sometimes humorous, always generous—are lovingly grounded in the ordinary. They are thinking poems—tightly crafted, accessible inquiries more interested in exploring stark and complicated knowledge than in proclaiming it.

American Poetry Now is a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America’s finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Virgil Suarez, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others.

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed elegy,” all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.

While Richard Shelton has been known primarily for his poems dealing with the landscape of the Southwest and the destruction of that landscape, the poems in this book are much more far-ranging, including many poems dealing with social issues (the issue of illegal immigration on our southern border, homelessness), historical events (the war in Iraq, the events of 9/11) and attitudes concerning politics and the environment. The poems are filled with sensory images, engaged in the real world, often ironic or simply off-the-wall, and their tone ranges from deeply sad, as in a requiem for Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, to the wildly funny, as in Brief Communications from My widowed Mother.

Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbit National Poetry Prize

“Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok’s poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our ‘clumsy living’ with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which ‘the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.'”—Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Winner of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Award.

Winner of the 2007 Poetry Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Magazine.

The poems are heartrending and incisive. Through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images (such as the Holocaust) are beautifully and luminously preserved.

Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.

Winner of the 2009 Chad Walsh Prize

Hodgen’s third book of poetry. The poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.

Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard or museum; New York, or New Mexico. These poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.

A new more mature Daisy Fried, writing about grown-up problems with the same insouciance and even more range and skill.

Finalist, 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award

Passionate and compassionate, these poems are both deeply imagined and accessible to the general reader, focusing on personal and political life in American society.

A book of poetry about the transitory physical world of the body, trains, and highways that reflects on the seamless quality of the present moment.

A career-spanning selection of work by a widely respected American poet, including a generous gathering of new poems.

David Wojahn was awarded the 2007 O. B. Hardison Poetry Prize for this collection.