Subject: Poetry / General

Subject: Poetry / General

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Burn

|9780822967521|Poems|The world is burning with fire and hatred, but at the same time it is filled with love and incredible beauty. The poems in Burn tango with why the world is so beautiful and terrible at the same time. Hamby asserts everything is a mess—how do we walk through it laughing and crying? Sometimes you look back and think, “How was I so lucky? I could have died a thousand times, but I didn’t. But I will.”| Barbara Hamby| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / General

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No Rhododendron

|9780822967484|Poems| Winner of the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertok’s oral mother tongue, Tamang: How do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring the erasure, ambiguity, multiplicity, violence, and unknowability signified by “X,” the poems dwell on the lip of a new ghost language, which ultimately fails itself. The polyphonal witnessing of the…

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Flop Era

|9780822967583|Poems|Flop Era reckons with the complications of being human, and therefore, with the consequences of being fundamentally flawed. It contends with failed potential and the certain uncertainty of the future, while interrogating the past for clues that might explain why, as the speaker bemoans, “there are never enough nails in the coffin of poor choices.” While Egger throws confetti on the quotidian, she disarms the reader with earnestness and vulnerability. Rich in metaphor, affable and self-deprecating, the poems in Flop Era shine a spotlight on regret, infidelity, the feminine ideal, fear of death, and fear of insignificance.| Lara Egger| Pitt…

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No Longer at this Address

|9780822967538|Poems|No Longer at This Address explores place and the psychology of leaving through the inflammatory lens of the American West. The collection uses the lyric-narrative mode to complicate notions of rootedness and address the ephemerality of where one’s from. The poems visit bison ranches in the Rocky Mountains, converse with a collapsed satellite, and find complicated joy among wildfire ash and lost dogs. No Longer at This Address is a catalog of various departures and arrivals and ultimately paints a portrait of one man’s attempt to make a new home with his loved ones in a volatile and uncertain future.|…

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What God in the Kingdom of Bastards

|9780822967576|Poems|What God in the Kingdom of Bastards is a poetic exploration of grief, memory, Blackness, and the haunting legacy of familial trauma by way of colonialism, told through the lens of two brothers: Lot, the elder, who is flesh and alive, and Frank, the younger, a ghost navigating his post-suicide existence. Their relationship anchors the collection, weaving themes of love, loss, and the arduous reconciliation between the living and the dead. Combining vivid imagery with fragmented, conversational tones of prayers, laments, and whispered confessions that are surreal and lyrical, Gyamfi delves into the ways trauma—both personal and systemic—permeates family, faith,…

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