|9780822957799|Hard-hitting, sophisticated, lyrical exploration of the meaning of the body. Questions icons and invokes taboos.| Jan Beatty| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / American / General Poetry / General

|9780822957881|Winner of the 2001 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry Selected by Marilyn Chin A poet with an artist’s eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp’s “terribly surreal” life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover’s—or a mother’s—secrets, Jacobik’s poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy.| Gray Jacobik| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / American / General Poetry / General

|9780822957867| Winner of the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Runner-up, Society of Midland Authors 2002 Poetry Prize Gabriel Gudding’s poems not only defend against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself. These poems sometimes nestle in the lowest regions of the body, and depict invective, donnybrooks, chase scenes, and the abuse of animals, as well as the indignities and bumblings of the besotted, the lustful, the annoyed, and the stupid. In short, Gudding seeks to reclaim the lowbrow. Dangerous, edgy, and dark, this is an innovative writer unafraid to…

|9780822957898|Rouge Pulp explores notions of body and beauty, birth and death, in a contemporary America driven by its contradictions: material plenty and spiritual lack. Dorothy Barresi writes about strippers, hair salons, cancer, good credit ratings, cockfights, childbirth, maternal love, war. Her poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair.| Dorothy Barresi| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / American / General Poetry / General

|9780822957874| Winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Prize Selected by Marilyn Nelson Finalist, 2003 Paterson Poetry Prize “Imagine Leda black—” begins Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s exciting new collection of poems. Mixing vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, she gives voice to silenced women past and present. In Van Clief-Stefanon’s powerful voice, last night’s angry words “puffed / into the dark room like steam / punching through the thick surface / of cooking grits.” She remembers a child’s innocence “lost / in the house where I learned the red rug / against my chest, my knees / my…