Books

This collection follows the physical and emotional struggles of a young boy growing up in 1950s America as he attempts to understand himself and the world around him.

Winner of 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, and the 2006 Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award.

Winner of 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

These artful, yet accessible poems are concerned with the body, desire, anxiety, and obsession—how what we want redeems and isolates us. They urge complete exploration of one’s physical and mental selves as a means to remain alive in the material world.

Winner of 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize Drawing her inspiration from she calls her “waking”, Amber Flora Thomas presents poems that depict humanity’s struggle to overcome its own flaws.

A career-spanning selection of work by a widely respected American poet, including a generous gathering of new poems.

David Wojahn was awarded the 2007 O. B. Hardison Poetry Prize for this collection.

A book of poetry about the transitory physical world of the body, trains, and highways that reflects on the seamless quality of the present moment.

Passionate and compassionate, these poems are both deeply imagined and accessible to the general reader, focusing on personal and political life in American society.

A new more mature Daisy Fried, writing about grown-up problems with the same insouciance and even more range and skill.

Finalist, 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award

Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard or museum; New York, or New Mexico. These poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.

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 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.

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.