Books

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.

American Poetry Now is a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America’s finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Virgil Suarez, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others.

Offers an accurate picture of science through the examination of nontechnical case studies which illustrate the various roles that experiment plays in science. Examines both sucessful and unsucessful experiments to show how scientists use experimental evidence and critical discussion to expand our knowlege of the natural world.

Tim Mayers explores the nature of the contemporary English department with the intent of drawing connections between the usually separate fields of creative writing and composition studies.

Intimate Enemies examines the transformation of Bolshevik Party ideology, language, and power relations during the crucial period leading up to Stalin’s seizure of power. Igal Halfin uncovers this evolution in the language of Bolshevism. This language defined the methods for judging true party loyalty-in what Halfin describes as an examination of the ‘hermeneutics of the soul,’ and became the basis for prosecuting the Party’s enemies, particularly the “intimate enemies” within the Party itself.

A critique of current pedagogies that introduces a psychoanalytical approach in teaching composition and rhetoric. Thomas Rickert builds upon the advances of cultural studies and its focus on societal trends and broadens this view by placing attention on the conscious and subconscious thought of the individual.

Winner, 2007 JAC Gary A. Olson Award

Sites Unseen challenges conventions for viewing and interpreting the landscape, using visual theory to move beyond traditional practices of describing and classifying objects to explore notions of audience and context. Treats landscape as a spatial, psychological, and sensory encounter, opening a new dialogue for discussing the landscape outside the boundaries of current art criticism and theory.

Winner of the 2009 Allen Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society

Pittsburgh in Stages offers the first comprehensive history of theater in Pittsburgh, placing it within the context of cultural development in the city and the history of theater nationally.Lynne Conner details the defining movements of each era and analyzes how public tastes evolved over time. She offers a fascinating study of regional theatrical development and underscores the substantial contribution of regional theater to American theatrical arts.

A comprehensive history of the development of Houston, examining the factors that have facilitated unprecedented growth—and the environmental cost of that development. Examines the steps Houston has taken to overcome laissez-faire politics, indiscriminate expansion, and infrastructural overload. An analysis of the environmental consequences of large-scale energy production and unchecked growth.