Pitt Poetry Series
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series Editors: Terrance Hayes, New York University; Nancy Krygowski, Carnegie Mellon University; Jeffrey McDaniel, Sarah Lawrence College

Since its inception in 1967, the Pitt Poetry Series has been a vehicle for America’s finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco, Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Ross Gay, Etheridge Knight, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others. Throughout its history, the Pitt Poetry Series has provided a voice for the diversity that is American poetry, representing poets from many backgrounds without allegiance to any one school or style.

The Law of Truly Large Numbers

Poems
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822967378
Pub Date: 14 Jan 2025
Description:
A new addition to the award winning Pitt Poetry Series

Still City

Poems
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822967354
Pub Date: 05 Nov 2024
A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822967217
Pub Date: 10 Jun 2024
Description:
Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye maps the cultural legacies we cherish against those we reject. Playful and wrenching by turns, with lines inflected by the spoken music of their Arabic, Oshiwambo, Xhosa, and Italian contexts, these profound poems explore a life where displacement is the norm. From choosing not to have children to wrestling with a left-hand stick shift in Johannesburg traffic to braising a camel loin for friends in Damascus, V.
Creature Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822967231
Pub Date: 10 Jun 2024
Description:
Written during the last five years of the poet’s father’s life, Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can’t be said by finding connection with other life forms: hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses, ravens, squid. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation.
In Parachutes Descending Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822967200
Pub Date: 10 Jun 2024
Description:
In Parachutes Descending follows the speaker’s decision to leave her Bostonian husband for Jane, a San Franciscan artist, while charting the sensual consequences of our bodily entanglements. These poems capture personal desires fermenting among current earthly cataclysms, including climate change and global capitalism. In doing so, this collection asks us to think inclusively about the ways we become with all humans and nonhumans, all of us—past, present, and future—intimately entwined with others.
The Selected Reginald Shepherd Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 168
ISBN: 9780822948216
Pub Date: 10 Jun 2024
Description:
Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet.
Climbing a Burning Rope Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822967224
Pub Date: 10 Jun 2024
Description:
New poetry by John Paul Davis.
Octobers Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822967088
Pub Date: 06 Feb 2024
Description:
Octobers traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language - as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.
That Ship Has Sailed Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822967057
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
That Ship Has Sailed synthesizes the serious and comic to address sex, love, loss, death, belief, the afterlife, and the past. The poems are honest and direct without sacrificing “the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts” that Keats singles out in his notion of “negative capability,” alluded to in the title poem. Amplified by the poet’s work as a traditional Irish musician and composer, language is the adhesive that brings the work together across the avant-garde to traditional forms and meters.
Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822967187
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
A Poetic Autobiography—Intimate, Sorrowful, and Funny Lynn Emanuel’s sixth collection of poetry is not sequential or straightforward. It has no conventional chronology, no master narrative. Instead, it is a life story, with all the chaos and messiness entailed therein.
Trailer Park Psalms Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822967125
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed.
The Rock That is Not a Rabbit Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822967156
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves.
Every Form of Ruin Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780822966913
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
A rebuttal to Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Every Form of Ruin posits the Erinyes’ fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra’s rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia’s relegation to a footnoted sacrifice. A fierce and darkly funny examination of anger, these lyrical poems push back against silencing by playing witness to a world where the experiences of women, nonbinary, and femme-identifying people are too often ignored, their responses dismissed as hysterical. These poems are also investigations into the loneliness of midlife; the search for one’s own self when that self has given its life to service.
Take Me to Stavanger Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822967163
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Amid the din of Russia’s patriotic sentiments and Instagram instants, is there any room left for the voice of a poet? Despite the many entertainments and distractions of modern life, Anzhelina Polonskaya’s spare but cutting poems in Take Me to Stavanger declare a wholehearted “Yes.” This bilingual Russian-English volume makes a refuge for the poet and her readers, plumbing the depths of contemporary melancholy and ennui.
Stop Lying Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 108
ISBN: 9780822967040
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Stop Lying is Aaron Smith’s most personal and vulnerable work yet. Revolving around the death of Smith’s mother and how the poet, a gay man, faces his upbringing where his sexuality was viewed as sinful and unnatural, these poems plumb the complexities of what families say and choose not to say. How does one grieve when a relationship will forever remain unresolved?
Ghost Variations Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822967194
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Elton Glaser’s ninth book of poems is haunted by the loss of his wife, each April bringing back the memory of her death. The opening line confesses the struggle to find a language for this grief: “I’m learning to speak in the accents of adieu.” As the book progresses through the seasons, it evokes the places that remind him of their times together, in the South of their youths, in the Midwest of their long marriage, and in their travels here and abroad.