Books

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

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.

A collection by a poet whose work is by turns humorous, dark, quirky, romantic, and lyric.

Winner of the 1992 Associated Writing Programs’ Award Series in Poetry

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Winner of the 1996 Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.