|9780822965626|Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van is a collection of relaxed and buoyant and sometimes very funny poems that address Desi & Lucy with the same courtesy as Walt Whitman. The author celebrates his roots in the Mid-West and a few pages later stops off in Transylvania. These poems like to sometimes embrace and sometimes confound expectations, and they all stand together as enemies of the murky and pompous. There is apparently no subject — Prometheus, a fifty foot woman, or Death himself — that is unwilling to fall under his spell.| Ron Koertge| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry / General

|9780822965596|The poems in Plasma, Bradley Paul’s third book, use common objects, animals, people, and experiences as starting points to consider one’s connectivity to the world. Riddles and obituaries alternate with rants and memories of things that never existed or that the speaker has never seen – or that he has, and struggles to remember. The title is inspired by all our conceptions of plasma: an infinitely conductive state of matter in which the many disparate parts act collectively to create a single, ever-shifting whole. The part of the blood that communicates and provides. The ethereal medium by which we watch…

|9780822965725|Poems| Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum’s third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as “the ocean on a shiny day,” and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson’s herbarium “might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists.”At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation’s associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of “the good against the violence” the speaker asks, “why can’t the line around the block on the free night/ at…

|9780822965954|Poems|Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that women’s identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmann’s poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a “junk” or “sad” pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America.| Rebecca Lehmann| Pitt Poetry Series| Poetry…

|9780822966104|Poems| In his new collection, Jeffrey McDaniel confronts the insular and expansive qualities of loss. With electric language and surrealistic imagery, McDaniel’s poems deliver the quotidian elements of middle-age life while weaving us in & out of childhood and adulthood alongside body and mind. The tragic and life affirming share the same page and the same world, reminding us how close corruption can be to innocence; domesticity to fantasy; aging to youth. Jonathan We are underwater off the coast of Belize. The water is lit up even though its dark as if there are illuminated seashells scattered on the ocean…