"When an avid reader of contemporary poetry discovers a book so full of warmth and eloquent exactitude, she is grateful and excited to read more by the author. This was my first experience of reading Joseph Bathanti's fourth book of poems, This Metal. I felt humbled by reading a poet whose voice was strong, but I was simultaneously dazzled by a vocabulary rich in metaphor and inflected by the language of faith and place." From the Introduction, by Mary Jo Bona

Light at the Seam, a new collection from North Carolina poet Joseph Bathanti, is an exploration of mountaintop removal in southern Appalachian coal country. The volume illuminates and champions often invisible people residing, in a precarious moment in time, on the glorious, yet besieged, Appalachian earth. Their call to defend it, as well as their faith that the land will exact its own reckoning, constitutes a sacred as well as existential quest. Rooted in social and restorative justice, Light at the Seam contemplates the earth as fundamentally sacramental, a crucible of awe and mystery, able to regenerate itself and its people even as it succumbs to them. More than mere cautionary tale, this is a volume of hope and wonder.

In The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, Joseph Bathanti offers poems that delve deep into a life reimagined through a mythologized past. Moving from his childhood to the present, weaving through the Italian immigrant streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to his parochial school, from the ballpark to church and home again, these contemplative poems present a situation unique to the poet but familiar to us all. As Bathanti recalls the joys, struggles, and confusion of his formative years in the late fifties and into the sixties, he gains a deeper understanding of the often surreal, always paradoxical world around him. He explores the perceived injustices of childhood, observes the mysteries of religious rituals, and examines the complex emotions families experience as children grow up and parents grow old. These poems divulge an eventful life, compelling us to reflect on our own as we confront a world of wonder and uncertainty. ""Across the strike zone swoops a dove, // maybe an angel. You're in Pittsburgh, // March; it's snowing. All week // you've seen angels; everyone's tired, // proclaiming even horrid things angels, // intimating miracles. Johnson's pitch // obliterates the bird- // a hail of feathers and dander, // as if inside a tiny bomb detonated. // Like a cartoon. Thoroughly unbelievable. // Around you, people are dying. // But you ignore it. // You laugh at the massacred dove. // It's not funny, but you laugh. // You could cry, rip your hair out, your clothes off, // crash through the seventhfloor window // into the slushy black streets of the city. // It's funny because it's not."" - from Angels

"In Anson County, Joseph Bathanti's generous heart turns the local into universal praises. Radiant as a welcome sun after rain, his reverence for people, places, and things fashions rare and extraordinary truths. Anson County is a substantive union of hymn and prayer." -Shelby Stephenson, author of Play My Music Anyhow

"Joseph Bathanti is a strong, eloquent voice in American poetry. His poems emanate from deep within himself and his culture, a world of rich ethnic ties and associations. I love the luminous details that he uncovers, again and again, like holy mysteries. His poems, which often deal - overtly and covertly - with religious themes, are restorative. These are, indeed, poems of restoration. Bathanti returns often to the well of memory, and he draws a fresh, sweet water from those depths." - Jay Parini The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems and Benjamin's Crossing "I am a sucker for Pittsburgh poetry, but it's not just the location that moves me in Bathanti's book. I like the two main things: the outrageous and amazing memory of particulars, of things; and the mad and tender turns the work suddenly takes. Bathanti is loyal, maybe grudgingly, to a dear - a loved and hated - world. Throughout the narrative, his poetic strategies are marvelous; one poem after another is deft, and moving, and original. This is an important book." - Gerald Stern Lucky Life and Bread Without Sugar "I am enraptured by the poems in Restoring Sacred Art, Joseph Bathanti's volume of love/hate poems about growing up and contending with the physicality of Pittsburgh, that unforgettable city. The language is rich, metropolitan, and accomplished, resounding with the poet's deep memories of friendship, family, neighborhood, school agonies, old cars, Catholicism, games, fights, binges, discoveries, hard jobs, affections, memories of a place and time. The stories and lines are artfully constructed, building to the moving conclusion of the book, when the poet returns annually to visit his people and remember the city. He never stops saying goodbye." - Paul Zimmer Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems and Trains In the Distance

"In his title poem, Joseph Bathanti writes that 'Even a mincing moon off cotton will yield/light enough to walk by.' There is something of pale moonlight in all these poems, by which I scarcely mean that they are vague. Rather, things as ordinary as field cotton are seen in a way so original as to seem magical. The author has his rhetorical reasons to call this masterful book Land of Amnesia, but in fact that author forgets nothing. .... The delicious, full-throated lyricism of this volume would alone be enough to recommend it. That it grapples so bravely and brilliantly with what I must feebly call Things That Matter makes it indispensable." - Sydney Lea, founder of The New England Review