Pitt Poetry Series

Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, a stunning debut collection revealing a mature complexity of craft and an original sophisticated vision.

Journey includes poems from three previous books spanning thirty years, along with a generous selection of new work that continues her radically individual celebration of the sacredness of life.

This collection spans twenty-five years in the career of this highly regarded poet. It features poems from the books Stars, Calling the Dead, When There Are No Secrets, and Against Dreaming, along with seventeen new poems.

There’s no predicting a Denise Duhamel poem, except that it might be about something you’ve never seen in a poem before: Mr. Donut, Rodney King, or nude beaches; Gertrude Stein, phone sex, or the Girl Scouts. This book showcases poems from her five previous collections, along with new work.

This is the first book in the Pitt Poetry Series by this popular and enigmatic poet, considered the foremost writer of prose poetry in America. In eleven collections over thirty years, Edson has created his own poetic genre, a surreal philosophical fable, easy to enter, but difficult to leave behind. In The Tormented Mirror, Edson continues and refines his form in seventy-three new poems.

Winner of the 1999 Associated Writing Programs’ Award Series in Poetry. Set against a fantastic backdrop of religious imagery, myth and dreams, science fiction, and the stark realities of a northern factory town, Voisine’s poems carefully detail the life of a common hero and his family.

Winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, this collection presents 33 narrative, linguistically-adventurous poems on love, sex, relationships, work, and news of twenty-somethings in the 21st century.

In Peter Meinke’s eleventh collection, he writes poems of humor and sadness. His poems speak truth with the self-assurance of a man willing to laugh at himself and, by extension, he invites us to laugh at ourselves as well.

Becker investigates how marginalized individuals negotiate public and private spheres, while inventing sustainable communities. She also explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and painter Rosa Bonheur’s lifelong relationships with women.

A selection of poems from three previous books as well as new work, Anderson writes out of deep grief for the political losses of work and money. A counterpoint to the sorrows in these poems is a wry, self-deprecating humor which saves the work from solemnity.

The poems of Shepherd’s third book seek to redefine the meaning of mythology, from the ruined representatives of Greek divinity to the dazzling extravagances of predecessors like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens.

A portrayal in verse of the argument between the work of the text and the world of the body, between the identity and persona of both the author and the reader.

In the winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Shara McCallum presents a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the struggle of those in exile to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country.

With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

To celebrate Billy Collins’s years as U.S. Poet Laureate, we are pleased to announce this special hardcover edition of one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation in the 1990s.