Five Collections for National Poetry Month

Jim Daniels is no stranger to bearing witness to the collapse of a town’s industrial economy. His hard-edged, personal poems about the economic devastation of Detroit are the very definition of blue-collar verse. In his new collection, From Milltown to Malltown, Daniels, with the aid of poet Jane McCafferty and famed photographer Charlee Brodsky, turns his attention to Homestead. With gentle humor and an ear for the language people actually speak (no highfalutin diction here), Daniels gives voice to residents of the community. A story of two Homesteads, From Milltown to Malltown documents the boarded-up windows of Eighth Avenue and the air-conditioned nightmare of The Waterfront complex. The poems lovingly riff off of Brodsky’s engaging black-and-white photographs.

Justin Hopper’s Public Record is a collaboration with the city in the purest sense. Not only are the poems inspired by crime reports from 19th-century Pittsburgh newspapers like the Pittsburg Dispatch, but the book itself, a gorgeous production from the local wunderkinds at Encyclopedia Destructica, is liberally sprinkled with color plates illustrated by local artists such as Wayno and Jeffrey Schreckengost. Now, if that wasn’t enough, there is also an interactive component to the book—whereby the reader can visit the actual locations where the poems took place, and, by way of an iPhone app, trigger an audio performance of the work. Ingenious! But none of this fancy schmancey hoo-ha would mean much at all if the poems themselves didn’t work as well as they do. Hopper recreates a Pittsburgh of the post-Civil War era, a hard-living town where residents were all too familiar with violence and death. Whether it’s the botched abortion and self-immolation detailed in “Done By Instruments,” the suicide of the imprisoned Anarchist of “The Anarchist’s Bible” or the vicious stabbing depicted in “Devil A Knife I Had,” Hopper, in all cases, grants the victims and assailants with a very human dignity. What could be salacious becomes, in fact, somewhat of a shadow history of our city.

If we had poetry royalty in Pittsburgh, then, surely, Jimmy Cvetic would be a king. For more than 30 years, Cvetic worked as a cop in Pittsburgh’s homicide and narcotics units. Currently, Jimmy manages gyms and promotes boxing matches. And when he isn’t doing that, he runs the venerable summer-reading series at Hemingway’s Café in Oakland, one of the longest-standing poetry venues in the city. If that’s not enough to merit a gold crown, Cvetic is also the author of thousands of poems. In Secret Society of Dog, the reader is treated to what almost amounts to an autobiography. We move through poems of Cvetic’s childhood, like the hilarious “Ass Whip Lesson,” to poems documenting his career as a police officer, like “Badge” and “Stolen Teeth.” In the waning pages, the poems turn ever more inward, more contemplative and less raucous, lighting upon hard-learned lessons: “And if a poem could issue warning, / just beware / beware / beware of the Old Bastards beware / they’re everywhere / they’re everywhere.”

Todd Sanders is perhaps best known for his translations of the French Surrealist poet Robert Desnos; however, in Species of Night, he allows his own muse to roam free. A small book of quiet yearning, Species of Night descends upon the reader like a velvet fog. Lines such as these from the poem “Umbra” nearly sigh in the reader’s ear: “I had you once. Among the birds, among the blue / glass. I felt your shade there upon my hand.” A sad dreaminess is pervasive; lovely poems of emotional depth appear on every page.

Stacey Waite’s third collection of poems, The Lake Has No Saint continues the author’s exploration of gender and identity. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of seeing Waite read her poems to an audience knows that she is a force of nature on stage.The intensity she brings—the forcefulness of her voice—can literally knock you on your behind. The Lake Has No Saint features a somewhat softer, but no less powerful, side of the poet. This quality is on display in one of her finest poems to date, when leaving the house as a man: “my mother sees / me in the suit and tie. She, for a moment, covers her eyes as though I had been naked and / not her child.”