Books published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press

Through the course of numerous books, Samuel Green has established his primary poetic preoccupations, and in Disturbing the Light, he continues to mine them, addressing rituals and work in a small, isolated, rural community; the influence of the past on the present, especially in families; and the nature and evolution of a love that has spanned five decades. Added to these themes is something new: Poems written in response to symptoms of late onset PTSD. Though Green's Coast Guard service in Vietnam ended in the fall of 1969, memories have returned recently in vivid, disturbing details, amplified by the haunting knowledge that civilians in Southeast Asia are still, today, suffering death and injury from unexploded ordnance left over from that war. A powerful collection that reminds us that our past is always with us, even as we attend carefully to the present, Disturbing the Light is a masterwork from a poet at the height of his powers.

Notebook entries by the award-winning San Francisco poet

Sojourners of the In-Between is a book about polarities, the mortality and sense of loss we feel as we grow older, and, on the other hand, the enlivening perceptions our years attune us to, what we might have missed in the full flush and energy of youth. In tones that are sometimes discursive and lyrical, humorous and elegiac, the poems suggest how large distances and abstractions might incline us more intensely to the materiality of things, their earthly make-up, even their dispersible elemental natures reshuffling into different guises. It's a book of longing for what disappears and is lost, and a book of thankfulness for our human capacity to sometimes sense what we often can only imagine.

At the funeral / the priest said, our sister enters the gates of paradise / in a company of angels. Mom, were you waiting? / I have no mother, your mothers gone, and / the you that lives on, me, I must learn she is / enough. From this room I see snow. Snow. Tomorrow is your / birthday. This is for you. The snow is melting. Ive built / a fire. Mom, the fingers of the dead / woman play as if in some paradise, paradise, and / your mouth pinkens to breathing red and smiles. I am here, / your daug

These are the people we are. Saint Friend, / carry me when I am tired and carry yourself. / Lets keep singing the songs we dont live by / lets meet tomorrow. Saint Friend is a book of empathy. Its ten lyric poems are troubled with the prospect of satisfying the wants and needs of others. While some of the poems take place in realistic settings or concern real peoplean airport, Amelia Earhartthis is a book where fantasy and reality are ultimately indistinguishable. SaintFriend is also a bo

Poems with a mothers voice. The blurb from Kaveh Akbar will definitely draw attention and situate this within the cool poets of now.

Dark, enigmatic, and sometimes comic, the stories in Partners and Strangers unite intimate anxieties with public dangers. Its characters embody grief, deviance, and the repressed: In "Yoav Feinsten's Last Year at Home," a teenager's pain over his father's death becomes unpredictably intertwined with an obsession with a cable man. In "A Home for an Eggplant," the specter of a Craigslist killer provides a backdrop for a couple's struggle with fertility. In "The Best Delivery Service," the narrator and his sister, living together after their parents' disappearance, obsessively order items through a hotline that promises delivery of anything one can imagine. The collection highlights a contemporary age characterized by loneliness and alienation. "How does Michael Don do it? The more absurd his situations--an eggplant on Craigslist, or a company that delivers anything from soft-shell crabs to the greatest mysteries of your life--the more real they feel. The more palpably real his characters' yearnings--inhabiting bodies and lives full of urges they can scarcely understand much less control--the more beautiful absurdity he unearths. Again and again, Don shows us how hard it is for us to know each other, how harder still it is to know ourselves, yet how startlingly a story just a few pages long can snap us into insight."--Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium

"You fetch / the daily things. You go on. There's nothing else to do." In Afterswarm, Margot Schilpp reveals and revels in the deep comfort we take in the common objects, people, and circumstances of our lives. She draws our attention back to those that have grown invisible in their familiarity, asking us to pause and weigh the significance of what we regularly encounter. The poems in this volume question and insist, return and twist, and ultimately point us toward the grace we can find in what's often overlooked. "Afterswarm is a collection of powerful, sometimes kaleidoscopic meditations on the human condition in a universe akin to Stephen Crane's, one which has 'no sense of obligation' for our existence. The trials of mutability, heartbreak, alienation, and mundanity are met with stoical tenacity (and, occasionally, wry humor) while 'shimmerings' of beauty and love are 'syncopated against loss.' These poems strike deep. And Schilpp's unembellished eloquence, musician's ear, and eye for evocative detail energize every page of this extraordinary book."--William Trowbridge, author of Vanishing Point

Emily Pettit is not afraid to confront the greatest of our universal experiences. Her Blue Flame is about time, space, loss, love, memory, fear, and staying alive. In this exquisite collection, she explores what happens to us in this world in the ways that only poetry can capture. "Blue Flame is a book about consciousness, about what it means to re-see the world all around us in a world full of ultimate vision. Because when the book tells us, "You are exactly where you are / supposed to be," we can believe it. Because these are poems that know everything and want to tell us so. Read this book and you will enter a heartbreaking world where beauty never ends, maybe thankfully. . . . In this book, she takes all of the very stuff of being alive and makes it a sound that seems like music but is better than music. Read this book and you will come alive again."--Dorothea Lasky, author of Thunderbird

Ordinary Chaos looks at the real, almost-real, unreal, and once-real phenomena that hide behind the veneer of ordinariness. With Kimberly Kruge's deep focus, daily life unfurls into strangeness--time and space become malleable materials as her observations of seemingly normal objects and situations expand, take on meaning beyond their appearance, and begin a life of their own. As much as the poems address the quotidian, they also consider the mysteries of mortality, awe, mysticism, comprehension, and violence. The pages are laced with an honest sense of sensitivity, fragility, and even impending condemnation--resulting in poems that are resilient but not invulnerable. Kruge, who now makes her home in Guadalajara, Mexico, also explores the immigration process and navigating an adopted country. These experiences all contribute to her transcendent exploration of physical, emotional, and psychological geography.

"With language that's as simple as it is musical, Di Piero sets dazzling moments amid plainsong."--New York Times Book Review For more than three decades, W. S. Di Piero's poems have reveled in the gritty realism of cities, often drawing from his childhood in South Philadelphia. The award-winning poet, writer, and art critic returns with his twelfth volume of poetry. The Complaints is a book of fortunes, laments, and celebrations--and about pulling the extraordinary ordinary. These sensuous poems speak of the ways we're hostages to chance and circumstance. Whether Di Piero writes about cranes migrating, city scavengers, diners, bars, bad weather, or movies and the memories they make, he reminds us how "We bone and tissue creatures stir up embers / of fiery wish."

New poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press

New poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press

New poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press

New poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press

"David Yezzi's fourth book of poems considers what it's like, during times of roiling change, to feel like a stranger on one's own street and in one's own country. This uprooting is partly geographic, partly psychic: what was familiar has become as foreign as the fabled Black Sea (the site of the Roman poet Ovid's exile). The emotional pressure of this dislocation pushes his poems into lyric fragments and mordant humor. Home, once a comfort, now hides a threat."--

"Immortal Village is a poetry collection about wildness versus domesticity, about desire set against the civilizing structures of myth, marriage, school, and village."--

"All hail the end of spectacle," announces a speaker in Virginia Konchan's anticipated debut collection of poems. Sharp, funny, serious, and elegant, the poems in The End of Spectacle have the intimacy and compression that come with the lyric proper. Through a combination of grand persona and personal narrative, Konchan is able to provide us a door into the consciousness of another while challenging the prevailing notion of human consciousness altogether. In this poet's hands, individualities become opportunities, as Konchan pushes us to question our notions of selfhood and its relationship to our construction of the world. A timely collection from a poet who dismantles power structures in order to lament the damage in echoing song: "The idea / of freedom! Someone leapt: / someone else was dragged."