Poetry / American / General

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

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Gerald Stern describes his poetry as “heartbreakingly beautiful.” John Updike proclaims his poems “consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that ...

Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet. Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with ...

City of Salt, Gregory Orr’s sixth book of poems, is largely autobiographical and presents moments of intense emotion which are anchored in clearly dramatized events. These are poems of elegy and celebration, and of occasions where the two modes fuse in acts of redemptive imagination.

“Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range—from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity—is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent.”—Henry Louis ...

This first collection of poems enacts the struggle of a young black gay man in his search for identity. Many voices haunt these poems: black and white, male and female, the oppressor’s voice as well as the oppressed. The poet’s aim, finally, is to rescue some ...

In choosing Cathy Song’s first book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Richard Hugo said that her poems are “bouquets to those moments in life that seemed minor but in retrospect count the most.” In this, Song’s third book, the poems are like ...

Late Empire, David Wojahn’s most wide-ranging collection of poetry, affirms his status as one of the most compelling and original voices of his generation. In these poems, private history and public history mingle and merge in a way that is by turns deeply personal and elegiac. Centered around tow ...

Ted Kooser’s third book in the Pitt Poetry Series is a selection of poems published in literary journals over a ten year period by a writer whose work has been praised for its clarity and accessiblity, its mastery of figurative language, and its warmth and charm.

A book of poems about “children” in the widest sense–from children of the Nazi-torn Warsaw ghettos to the American poor, as well as poems of domesticity, love, and daily life.

“A great poem of this end of our century. It is masterfully structured in recurring themes and voices which build on and off each other. Gardinier is above all a poet whose language and images are completely integrated so that in Keats’s words, every rift is laden with ore. ...

“I am reminded of the Argentinean writers Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, but with sunglasses and in California. The Flying Garcias is a sure voice and a fine book.” —Alberto Ríos

Winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The poems in this book deal with life in a Pennsylvania Mennonite community and the tensions and conflicts that exist for the speaker as she tries to be true to two worlds, the other being New York City.

Winner of the 1991 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry

Previous Praise for Maggie Anderson’s Cold Comfort “We are struck by the generosity of a voice that manages to bridge the gap between a personal and a world view, a balance that reveals a narrator who is of the world yet not overwhelmed by it.” —Prairie Schooner