Bøger udgivet af Carnegie-Mellon University Press

A poetic exploration of life amid intimate losses. In Museum of the Soon to Depart, poet Andy Young searches for her place in history as it unfolds around her through revolution, plague, and natural disaster. As curator of her museum, she navigates her own and others' suffering through intense observation, from the inner mechanisms of grief and illness to the solace of distance provided by photography. The material of the poet's own life and events on the world stage intertwine, resulting in poems with a staggering range, inhabiting language in ways that ultimately point to its limits.

A new poetry collection from Eleanor Stanford that is musical, sexy, and darkly funny. These poems take the reader from Mexico City to West Philadelphia to Karachi. The works wade into the difficult joys of mothering, self-exploration, and romantic entanglement in midlife. Throughout, Eleanor Stanford embraces the mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen, the abjection of Tammy Wynette, and the wry self-appraisal of Sylvia Plath, fashioning it all into something entirely its own.

Poems that reflect on the current tragedy in Ukraine. In her newest collection, Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready to stare down the demons, to "cut yourself with a dull razor." She sets up house among the nightmares of intergenerational trauma and, as far as anyone can, humanizes them. Through her work, Orlowsky prompts us to enter our own histories instead of just watching.

Poems that arise from the currents of felt experience. Joseph Millar's lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar's sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems' subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions--love, work, death, desire--and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.

A poetic journey through historical and fictional love and loss. Karenmaria Subach's Her Breath on the Window reflects upon longing in its range of forms, moving in rich lyrical detail through history and the world of fantasy/mythos. Through formal poems, riddle, and sustained lyric contemplative expression, Subach offers her own "blue perfume flask with a gold band," the "trade" of art, hard-won through what the writer has survived. In these poems, Hadrian and Antinous, Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Snow White and the Prince, as well as a range of separated lovers and characters divided by war, death, and family trauma are explored in their often-desperate predicaments. These poems are narratively dense, voice- and image-driven, full of passion and rage, and they draw on the poet's training in literature, languages, and history.

A poet wrestles with faith and loss post-pandemic. In these poems, Peter Cooley encounters both the political realities of loss through the pandemic in New Orleans and personal loss through the deaths of family members and friends. Death is a constant in this book of elegies, but the redemptive power of representation is persistent as this poet of faith memorializes imagined and lived experiences.

"In Cemetery Nights, Dobyns explores a full range of human experience, from the fabulous storytelling of our dreams to the mute, explosive passions of domestic life, from vital distortions of familiar myths to strange tableaux of creation and death. Most of the poems are narratives-often frightening and sometimes downright funny-spun with a dark extravagance and aimed, with striking exactness, at our essential lives. The world of Cemetery Nights is haunted by regret, driven by desire and need, illuminated by daring make-believe; Mr. Dobyns has created here a remarkable bridge between pure entertainment and deep psychological insight"--

A collection of poetry by Allison Joseph.

"There's Something They're Not Telling Us is a meditation on the nuances of domestic life, of learning to exist in the constant presence of an other. Through the interrogation of a thesis on what holds us to the present moment, the collection explores the rapture and isolation of marriage and the quotidian. The poems ask us to consider what it means to live on a planet charged with entropy and in bodies that move towards natural and unnatural ends. The work does not purport to provide answers so much as it aims to keep the reader in the text, which is experiential and alive"--

"Michael McFee's twelfth collection of poetry explores challenging subjects-the realities of aging, the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the disappearance of Appalachian culture-in poems that discover enduring pleasures in the details of our everyday lives. It also includes vivid, lively, and imaginative responses to quirky words, a jazz standard, family members, celebrities, and several paintings. As one reader has said, "In his poems filled with quotidian experience, the objects of the material world shimmer with consequence: they are alight with attention-McFee's, and through his art, ours. He is one of our best poets.""--

"The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder is a gathering of "punk formalist" lyrics that collectively are a meditation not on mortality so much as on the terror of extinction, how that terror is the reservoir of love. Katrovas declaims from the margins of faith, the cliff edge of doubt, seeking to measure the conductivity of private troubles to public issues. Katrovas' "riffs" are verse essays jotted in the antechambers of nightmares and erotic dreams"--

"Bel Canto is a collection belonging to the post-confessional tradition, whose protean speaker, a fast-talking theorist brimming with hypotheses and maxims, seeks to dismantle various power hierarchies by a dramatic staging of interiority and sensuous rebirth of meaning and desire, in moving, complex, funny, and cutting poems that cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. Suggesting that revolutionary change will be linguistic, or will not be at all, Bel Canto critiques the alienating forces of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy by restoring primacy to lyric subjectivity, sensibility, paradox, and alterity through a kaleidoscopic array of registers, modes, and idioms ironic and sincere. "What human could stay so quiet?" asks the speaker of "Epistle": "One who is secretly on fire.""--

"In the wry and tender poems of Barbara Edelman's All the Hanging Wrenches, we encounter creatures both wild and domestic; family, friends, strangers, and history, all deftly transfigured through poignant turns of phrase. Edelman's delight in wordplay is contagious. Time and the boundaries of memory are fluid amid adventures, reflection, and the glorious contradictions that are real life. "At the shoreline where waves flowed through windows in rock, we rode in and came out changed, our brains full of ocean," Edelman writes. With great good humor and sadness in equal portion, this is a book of quiet triumph in which all the ghosts abide"--

A reissuing of National Book Award winner Denis Johnson's first two collections of poems

Ranging from love song to train song to jump rope rhyme, the poems of Sometimes We're All Living in a Foreign Country are voiced by perpetual outsiders searching for a sense of place from small Southern towns to the tunnels and tracks of the urban North. Personal and regional histories blur through the intimate paths of tornadoes, guns, suburban sprawl, and the ongoing quest to escape where we come from.

In Rachel Richardson's second collection of poems, she juxtaposes the grand quests of Ahab and Melville with the quotidian journeys of contemporary life. Hundred-Year Wave launches stories of marriage and motherhood over the currents of a nearly mythological ancestry: women and men who built their possessions out of iron and flour and whalebone and wool. If reaching back into the past is akin to plumbing a depth, then Richardson exhibits the rare abilities of craft to build, from our language, vessels light enough to travel on that element, but sturdy enough to weather the storms we are likely to find there.