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 Gates, Jr.
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 portion of the drowned and the drowning.
In this, Song’s third book, the poems are like the school figures an ice skater etches onto the ice – the pen moving silently and deliberately across a white expanse of paper and experience, bringing maximum pressure to bear upon the blade of language to unlock “the invisible fire beneath the ice.”
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 masterful elegies for the writers parents, the poems also treat an array of subjects familiar to us from news events but rarely examined by contemporary poetry.
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.
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.
Praise for Maggie Anderson’s earlier work, Cold Comfort:“The crux of Maggie Anderson’s poems is the strong narrative line, one accompanied by an abundance of lore based in the folkways of the people. And her energy is that very essence of the old stories and poetry—present in the talk of ordinary people.”—Shelby Stephenson
Set amidst the mysteries and tragedies of South American culture, this book-length narrative poem is both an account of their journey and a feminist exploration of the struggle between the sexes.
Peter Meinke was a master of traditional poetic forms long before the current interest in “the new formalism.” His work is, in turn, witty, comic, sane, deeply moving, and always readable. Liquid Paper collects the best of his previously published poems from the late 1960s on with a generous selection of new work.
The result is a book of discursive meditations that will amply reward the reader. Part travelogue, part pilgrimage in which the shrines remain hidden until they are recognized later, Larry Levis’s startling and complex fifth book of poems is about the enslavement to desire for personal freedom, and the awareness of its price.
