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What would it take to be home in one's body, to walk around the
world as oneself, knowing the pain within and without us? Jan
Beatty boldly answers that question by making a fire map of the
body. These roiling poems smack into walls of meditation, only to
slide down the smooth concrete into the flatline of joy. These are
vital poems of dimension, of both psychic and literal travel, of
the elasticity of truth and struggle, of the daily nature of desire
that brings us to our knees - then shotguns us back to the heart's
center.
This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump-about much more
than Trump. These are poems that either embody or express a sense
of empathy or outrage, both prior to and following his election,
since it is empathy the president lacks and outrage he provokes.
There is an extraordinary diversity of voices here. The ninety-two
poets featured include Juan Felipe Herrera, Richard Blanco, Carolyn
Forche, Patricia Smith, Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall, Elizabeth
Alexander, Ocean Vuong, Marge Piercy, Yusef Komunyakaa, Brian
Turner, and Naomi Shihab Nye. They speak of persecuted and
scapegoated immigrants. They bear witness to violence: police
brutality against African Americans, mass shootings in a school or
synagogue. They testify to poverty, the waitress surviving on
leftovers at the restaurant, the battles of a teacher in a shelter
for homeless mothers, the emergency-room doctor listening to the
heartbeats of his patients. There are voices of labor, in the
factory and the fields. There are prophetic voices, imploring us to
imagine the world we will leave behind in ruins lest we speak and
act. However, this is not merely a collection of grievances. The
poets build bridges. One poet steps up to translate in Arabic at
the airport; another declaims a musical manifesto after the
hurricane that devastated his island; another evokes a
demonstration in the street, an ecstasy of defiance, the joy of
resistance. The poets take back the language, resisting the
demagogic corruption of words themselves. They assert our common
humanity.
In Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and
collisions of over twenty years of work. She moves from
first-person narratives to poems that straddle the page in
fragments, to lines that sprawl with long lines of train tracks.
Always landing in meaning, we are inside the body—not in a
confessional voice, not autobiography—but arriving through the
expanded, exploded image of many stories and genders. The new poems
leap imagistically from the known world to the purely imagined, as
in the voice in "Abortion with Gun Barrel": "I am the
counselor,/there are cracks in the barrel of the gun/there is
aiming/shots of sorrow—/ shots of light." Commitment to a rabid
feminist voice continues, but arrival has a new ring to it, with
beginnings rescripted: "I am a bastard./I walk around in this body
of mine." Beatty's fascination with the highway and the breakout
West jackknifes at the crossroads of the brutal and the white
plains of loss—the body torn down and resurrected in the twenty
first century.
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 the
long-abandoned story of the birthfather. There is no stable
landscape here except the horizontal action of "moving through."
Landscape becomes story. In this extended tale of the "idea" of
family, we find stand-ins for the father in the form of a hit man,
Jim Morrison, and ultimately the unyielding road takes the place of
the body. "The Switching/Yard" is at once the horizontal world of
the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the
body where gender routinely shifts and switches, and the actual
switching yard of the trains that run the inevitable tracks of this
book.
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Red Sugar (Paperback)
Jan Beatty
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R468
R369
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The torso facing east, the head nearly west, as if she couldn't
take in the sight of her own skin and its failings, its parts
spilling. D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan
Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the
incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play
like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis
insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own
fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery'
in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes
sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of
Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett
Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for
Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the
Arts
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Mad River (Paperback)
Jan Beatty
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R454
R368
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Winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Winner of the
2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
"In every poem, she keeps her fury contained, but omnipresent, so
that it resembles a cornered dog’s warning growl, yet she hints
of happier possibilities."—Booklist
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