Books

Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.

Winner of the 2009 Chad Walsh Prize

Hodgen’s third book of poetry. The poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.

Winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Winner of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Award.

Winner of the 2007 Poetry Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Magazine.

The poems are heartrending and incisive. Through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images (such as the Holocaust) are beautifully and luminously preserved.

Winner of the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

The stories explore America’s obsession with news and entertainment culture. In the title story, a theme park has attractions where visitors relive actual news events such as “OJ’s Bronco: The Ride”, and “Seige at Waco”.

Examines a half-century epoch when planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh. Defines Pittsburgh’s key role in the national urban planning movement.

Winner of the 2008 First Place/Book Prizefrom the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies

Examines the intersection of environmental politics, globalization, and national identity in post-Soviet Latvia. Views the country’s responses to European assistance and political pressure in nature management, biodiversity conservation, and rural development.

Examines the natural and economic resource competition between Phoenix and Tucson and the other factors contributing to the divergent growth of the two cities.

Examines the conflicts that have developed over the preservation of forests in America, and how government agencies and advocacy groups have influenced the management of forests and their resources for more than a century.

Scholars of rhetoric, composition, and communications analyze how discourse is used to construct working-class identities. The essays connect working-class identity to issues of race, gender, and sexuality, among others.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbit National Poetry Prize

“Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok’s poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our ‘clumsy living’ with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which ‘the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.'”—Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.

While Richard Shelton has been known primarily for his poems dealing with the landscape of the Southwest and the destruction of that landscape, the poems in this book are much more far-ranging, including many poems dealing with social issues (the issue of illegal immigration on our southern border, homelessness), historical events (the war in Iraq, the events of 9/11) and attitudes concerning politics and the environment. The poems are filled with sensory images, engaged in the real world, often ironic or simply off-the-wall, and their tone ranges from deeply sad, as in a requiem for Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, to the wildly funny, as in Brief Communications from My widowed Mother.

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed elegy,” all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.

The Pirates Reader is a tribute to the Pittsburgh Pirates, their fans nationwide, and to the franchise’s rich history of baseball—Richard Peterson has collected the writing of baseball’s greatest storytellers. Included are early pioneers of sports journalism, such as Henry Chadwick, the father of baseball statistics, and Alfred H. Spink, founder of The Sporting News.

Centered around mostly ordinary people, Harry, Tom, and Father Rice relates the story of the author’s uncle Harry Davenport, union leader Tom Quinn, and Father Charles Owen Rice to the great conflict between anti-Communist and Communist forces in the American labor movement.

Part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology— the book offers a glimpse of an aesthetic “other” (the Ishir [Chamacoco] of Parguay), causing us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, religion, and Native American culture.