Pitt Poetry Series

The debut collection of Agnes Lynch Starrett winner Shao Wei, a Chinese-American poet, blends fairy tales, New York images, family stories, and the universal rites of passage associated with growing up to paint a vibrant canvas of passion and imagination. She captures the struggle of many immigrants as she describes her efforts to balance the influences of her childhood along the Yangtze river and her adulthood in New York City.

Whether cataloging her flower garden or worrying about her son, admiring a trio of aged aunts or recovering from an argument with her husband, the narrator in these beautifully lyric poems deftly explores imagination, relationships, and the unlived possibilities in our own lives. Like the currents of time that pull us inexorably into the future, Sandra Kohler leads us through The Ceremonies of Longing, illuminating the magic that inhabits daily life and ordinary dreams.

Past winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, this long-time author from Black Sparrow Press is known for her fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.

A powerful collection that doesn’t shirk from showing pain that includes thirteen new poems along with selections from her four previous volumes of poetry.

Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry

A unique sequence of narrative poems focusing on Galileo’s life, relationships, and work. George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written.

Shara McCallum is on of the most compelling voices in American poetry. In her second collection Song of Thieves she artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.

The fourth collection from this much-praised poet combines lyricism with experimentation, creating a unique synthesis of passion and linguistic exploration.

A powerful new voice on the poetry scene, Van Clief-Stefanon writes of pain, loss, hope, and the promise of salvation.

Barresi’s poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair.

Dangerous, edgy, and dark, Gudding offers a defense not only against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself.

Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mature, elegant, and crackling with energy, this volume won the 2001 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry.

Hard-hitting, sophisticated, lyrical exploration of the meaning of the body. Questions icons and invokes taboos.

In Dean Young’s fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations.

Selected by Li-Young Lee as the Winner of the 2000 Associated Writing Programs’ Award Series in Poetry, this debut collection of poems illuminates details that make the familiar seem strange.

Winner of the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University.

The fourth collection from an award-winning poet that examines our ability to create our own misery and our own happiness.