Books published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press

"Deborah Pope's poems give voice to a life deeply felt and fully realized, whose very personal visions yield universal claims. At the heart of this poetry's fanaticism is the search for the ground of intimacy and the configurations of identity. It is a measure of Pope's skill that each recognition seems powerfully right, not sought but given"--

"Dan Rosenberg's third collection of poetry moves from loss into parenthood, exploring the roles of husband and father: their limits, their possibilities, and how they intersect with the wider world. Grounded in the familial, these poems wrestle with the political and the ecological, with heritage and hope, reimagining the breadth of home and what it means for one man to raise another to love it"--

"Out Beyond the Land refracts the subtle moments in nature where what is seen and unseen twists and loops back, gently nudging the speaker to question how knowledge is formed and memorialized. Using the Latin's "A priori" and "A posteriori" as a starting point, these lyrics work to form a kind of double helix in which the strands of empirical and intuitive knowledge twist and become one. In the silence that follows, the speaker comes to terms with both her attachment to nature's permanence and nature's solid independence from our attachment"--

"The poems in Internal West practice a careful empiricism, offering a science of the human, a way to understand the world through watching and listening. Becker's poems are as much in the Eastern European tradition of Daniel Simko as the American tradition of George Oppen. As the poet herself has stated, her main themes are the complete truth of what her life has been; of feeling alone even in supposed relationships"--

"Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar's finest poetic work, including his beloved and award-winning poems centered on the unseen men and women at the margins of American life. Millar's poems don't favor beauty over suffering, nor do they reach for knowledge over mystery-instead, his words carry forward their Whitmanic imperatives: to turn away from nothing, to be awash in contradictions"--

"Mangrove forests grow on coastlines, with root systems that hold them upright in the unstable grounds where land and water meet. That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove draws on the in-between nature of these trees to explore spaces between-between a foot and the floor, a cup of coffee and its dish, a face and the shoulder of a couple on a motorbike. These are poems that dwell in the tidal movement between saying and what's left unsaid"--

"Yes and No is a book about looking back and looking forward. Many of the poems deal with the loss of friends and relatives whose spirits remain in the poet's life in memory and even apparition. As the title connotes, the collection is about affirmation and negation: there are love poems and poems of the devastating loss of love and poems of passion and the dwindling of it. A spiritual thread runs through the book as well, as seen in the opening poem, "Prayer at the Masked Ball," and in the question asked in the title poem: "are we connected to the infinite, or not?"--

In a series of stylized, highly visual vignettes employing puppetry, poetry, and surrealism, the Weird Sisters from Macbeth explore the stories of women who disappear, whether by choice or force. Inspired by history, astronomy, and Shakespeare, Witches Vanish examines the nature of change and the value of human life.