Subject: Poetry / General

Subject: Poetry / General

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Climbing a Burning Rope

|9780822967224|Poems|In Climbing a Burning Rope, John Paul Davis focuses his peculiar imagination, philosophical lyricism, and misfit spiritual outlook on life in the hypercapitalist twenty-first century where the inscrutable logic of algorithms haunts our constantly connected selves. Celebrating the weird and wild, lamenting wounds and weariness, Davis’s poems carve out a space in which we can reclaim what is sacred and be reminded to keep something of ourselves for ourselves.| John Paul Davis| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / General

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A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye

|9780822967217|Poems|Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye maps the cultural legacies we cherish against those we reject. Playful and wrenching by turns, with lines inflected by the spoken music of their Arabic, Oshiwambo, Xhosa, and Italian contexts, these profound poems explore a life where displacement is the norm. From choosing not to have children to wrestling with a left-hand stick shift in Johannesburg traffic to braising a camel loin for friends in Damascus, V. Penelope Pelizzon’s poems transport us into unexpected depths of feeling with language that is…

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The Selected Shepherd

|9780822948216|Poems|Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on the…

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Creature

|9780822967231|Poems|Written during the last five years of the poet’s father’s life, Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can’t be said by finding connection with other life forms: hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses, ravens, squid. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation.| Marsha de la O| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / General

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In Parachutes Descending

|9780822967200|Poems|In Parachutes Descending follows the speaker’s decision to leave her Bostonian husband for Jane, a San Franciscan artist, while charting the sensual consequences of our bodily entanglements. These poems capture personal desires fermenting among current earthly cataclysms, including climate change and global capitalism. In doing so, this collection asks us to think inclusively about the ways we become with all humans and nonhumans, all of us—past, present, and future—intimately entwined with others.| Tana Jean Welch| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / General

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