"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 "Beatty does offer deeply visceral and sensory work, especially in the second and third sections of this three-part book. . . . She risks relative boldness and deep emotional commitment, disregarding political correctness in respect for this less readily sanitized realm of experience." --Publishers Weekly "Her poems speak to us head-on, with courage and a ...
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"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 "Beatty does offer deeply visceral and sensory work, especially in the second and third sections of this three-part book. . . . She risks relative boldness and deep emotional commitment, disregarding political correctness in respect for this less readily sanitized realm of experience." --Publishers Weekly "Her poems speak to us head-on, with courage and a contemporaneous eloquence." --Yusef Komunyakaa "Raw, energetic, gritty, risky, sexy, and real. . . . The power of these short narratives is often cumulative, building a vision of the world seen through the eyes of a wanderer, a woman, a waitress." --Dorianne Laux Jan Beatty, winner of the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, has also won two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has held jobs as a welfare caseworker, a rape counselor, and a nurse's aide. She has worked in maximum security prisons, hoagie huts, burger joints, jazz clubs, and diners. Her chapbook, Ravenous, won the 1995 State Street Press Chapbook Prize. Her latest collection, Boneshaker, was published in 2002 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
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Fine. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 64 p. Pitt Poetry. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers.
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New. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 64 p. Pitt Poetry. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers.
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On page one of this intense, motorcycle ride through the painful landscape of Beatty?s experience, we are introduced to her birth mother, and her illegitimate conception. Like many of the poems in this collection, the story unfurls like a blossom, savage yet unsentimental. The birth mother?s longing, poverty, and selfishness are all rendered with deft strokes, as well as her own summation: "Should I say you did your best,/ a spare girl from a broken family,/ or should I say it straight?you wanted it, you took it, like we all do..."
Winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Mad River chugs madly through the heart of us, as the title portends. In the poem Mad River, Beatty refers to her heart pumping its mad river while kissing a greyhound bus driver for food, enduring his unwanted touch for sustenance, making us cringe in horror as if we were sitting in the back seat: we can smell the hot vinyl in the dark chevy, we are queasy at the image she evokes with "...wanting to spit up the dark beans,/ their reddish bodies staining my insides like a dead baby/..."
What Beatty offers in this collection is a visceral trip through her inner landscape, and there we meet abused children, stripped of power; prisoners rotting in cells with no language; sexual predators disguised as doctors. We meet her mistakes, lapses in judgment, as in Highway 99, when she finds herself alone with a convicted rapist, in his lair, her "...high fading like a wicked joke." Beatty again and again slaps us awake and says LOOK! Don?t look away!
We also meet in this collection her deep heart, her intrinsic goodness. She cares deeply and unabashedly for people. She lets it break her heart, then shows us her wounds so we can feel it too. In one of my favorite of her poems, Ravenous Blue, she is visiting her friend who is dying of AIDS. In the spaces between the words they don?t say, she paints a picture of a happier time they shared, connecting the past and present with the color blue. In the end though, she comes back, "...I?m so sorry we are here, and this is you, dying."
Beatty?s use of color in this collection is fugal, and serves to remind us of her great technical talent. Torrid red, ravenous blue, cobalt blue all make appearances, and reappear: ravenous blue hair dye and the ravenous blue tongue in the poem, Free World. Forbidden pleasures are deep blue in Blue Dress, and the red dress means desire in Love Poem. There is also blood-colored lipstick, yellow stamen, an orange-red peach, the sweet rich green in Breaking the Skin. But Black is the color she does the best.
A good poet can bring a reader to new thoughts, new ideas with the power of their language; a great poet can bring you there, then make you cry, make you squirm, and hold you there. Beatty is of the latter group, and then some. She holds your face to it, but you love her for it.
