Pitt Poetry Series

In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet’s mind, heart, and spirit as Alicia Suskin Ostriker struggles with the meaning of family, politics, and faith.

City of a Hundred Fires presents us with a journey through the cultural coming of age experiences of the hyphenated Cuban-American.

Richard Blanco was selected as the 2013 inaugural poet by President Barack Obama.

Mark Cox delivers a powerful exploration of the vagaries, ironies, and responsibilities of familial and romantic relationships. With humor, tenderness, a dose of terror, and an occasional swerve into the surreal, these poems probe the evolution of self, self-consciousness, and the interior psychological landscape – the effects of our past patterns and influences on the world of the present. By turns humorous and dark, straightforward and oblique, these poems are inventive and intelligent without forsaking accessibility.

Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, Eve’s Striptease suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Julia Kasdorf writes of a life’s migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing – sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them.

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.

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had “an all-but-completed manuscript” of poems. After Levis’s death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy.

Toi Derricotte’s fourth collection of poetry. Tender probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.

The fifth collection of poetry by David Wojahn. The Falling Hour is a book in which the workings of personal history collide with the forces of public history, examining loss and cultural legacies. Marks a significant advance from Wojahn’s previous works, as he employs both strict forms and free verse.

Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith – Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth – in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion.

Angel, Interupted is Reginald Shepherd’s second poetry collection. The poems are lyrical, streetwise and contemporary, yet timeless, classically referential, and introspective.

The locales of these poems range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to the Andes, the subjects from memories of Kilwein Guevara’s native Colombia to a New York street scene. What characterizes all of them is precise and surprising language, a brilliance of effect, that establishes him as one of the most original young American poets.

Winner of the 1996 Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.

Winner of the 1994 Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize and the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

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.

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 clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects.