|9780822962311|This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. In The Government of Nature, Afaa Michael Weaver explores the trauma of his childhood—including sexual abuse—using a “cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism.” Weaver is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body.| Afaa Michael Weaver| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / American / General Poetry / General

|9780822962366| Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award. In Blowout, Denise Duhamel asks the same question that Frankie Lyman & the Teenagers asked back in 1954—”Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Duhamel’s poems readily admit that she is a love-struck fool, but also embrace the “crazy wisdom” of the Fool of the Tarot deck and the fool as entertainer or jester. From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Duhamel explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations. She also examines love through music, film, and history—Michelle and Barak Obama’s inauguration and Cleopatra’s ancient sex toy. Duhamel…

|9780822962342|Translations from the Flesh, Elton Glaser’s seventh full-length collection of poetry, is driven by the powerful engines of love and desire. In poems long and brief, playful and intense, Glaser evokes what it feels like “to fall into / Love and its infinite mistakes.” In a style that might be described as “flamboyant stoicism” (a phrase from Simon Callow,) he explores our human urgencies and weaknesses, following wherever our appetites lead us, whether hormonal or spiritual, cravings that we struggle to understand. The voice that says “Apprentice me to mysteries of the flesh” speaks for everyone intent on making sense…

|9780822962380|Poems and Advice|Daisy Fried’s third book of poetry is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender, riding the train with Princeton seniors who have been rejected by recession-bound Wall Street, feeding stray cats drunk at midnight, bitching at her mother in the labor room, shopping with wide-bodied hunters for deer-dismembering band saws in the world’s largest supplier of seasonal camouflage, cursing her cell phone and…

|9780822962410| In Jan Beatty’s fourth collection, The Switching/Yard, she takes us through the ravaged landscape of the American West. In unflinching lines of burning lyric and relentless narrative, she forges the constructed body into movement. What is still stereotyped as the romantic journey—now becomes as scarred as the Rust Belt. What lives in our collective unconscious as the Golden West becomes almost surreal, as these poems snap that vision in half with extended description of ghost explorers. We see the open truck cab, the farm workers on the corner waiting for pick-up; we see the speaker returning west to find…