Subject: Poetry / General

Subject: Poetry / General

Comments

Green Age

|9780822954217|Alicia Suskin Ostriker is that rare combination, a writer equally admired as poet and critic. The variety of subjects in Green Age is characteristic of her writing: from the opening poem, “Fifty,” funny, courageous, and defiant, to a set of birthday poems for a grown daughter; from emulations of the Persian mystic Rumi, to the provactive “Meditation in Seven Days,” whose central assumption is that we may find in the Bible traces of a Canaanite goddess whose worship was forbidden with the advent of patriarchal monotheism. But if her subjects may seem formidable, her poems are not. Ostriker is accessible,…

Read more

Comments

Captivity

|9780822954224|What are the forces that cause us to strike out and harm each other? Captivity explores the way in which the individual is held hostage by society; how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism frequently express themselves as violence within the family. The book also explores a deeper captivity, like the Jews in Egypt yearning for the Promised Land, the soul trapped in exile from God.| Toi Derricotte| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / American / General Poetry / General

Read more

Comments

Refuge

|9780822954415| Winner of the 1989 Associated Writing Programs’ Award Series in Poetry “Waring’s poems forcibly avoid the workshop warp. From the opening, her language lashes. . . . Anyone would be convinced of both her originality and her toughness. . . . Waring uses tactics that women singers have known about for a long time: the balm of the work song and the empowering sounds a brassy belter makes as she sings of a tough life that earns her a living.”–Voice Literary Supplement | Belle Waring| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / American / General Poetry / General

Read more

Comments

The Makings of Happiness

|9780822954484|Wallace’s poems cover the range of human experience: music, religion, sex, art, childhood, adolescence, nuclear war, illness, and death. But it’s in his wit and good humor, against undercurrents of sorrow and grief that best characterize his poetry: part Emily Dickinson, and part Harpo Marx; part Woody Allen, and part Robert Frost.| Ronald Wallace| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / American / General Poetry / General

Read more

Comments

The Widening Spell of the Leaves

|9780822954545|The result is a book of discursive meditations that will amply reward the reader. Part travelogue, part pilgrimage in which the shrines remain hidden until they are recognized later, Larry Levis’s startling and complex fifth book of poems is about the enslavement to desire for personal freedom, and the awareness of its price.| Larry Levis| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / American / General Poetry / General

Read more