Boneshaker: (Pitt Poetry Series)

Hard-hitting, sophisticated, lyrical exploration of the meaning of the body. Questions icons and invokes taboos.

About the Author :
Jan Beatty is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently The Body Wars and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, which won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Prize. Beatty has worked as a waitress, in abortion clinics, and in maximum-security prisons and is professor emerita at Carlow University, where she directed the MFA and creative writing programs and the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.

Review :
What is the body? In Jan Beatty's courageous, beautiful, and harsh new book, Boneshaker, the body is as horrifyingly without boundaries as the cosmos, as constricted as a prison cell. Language, too, is a body. At times it is stitched up tight in the strictures of narrative "So I walked in with a hard jones/ for the magic bullet that would make life/move again—still waiting for the get-off,/ the knowing-it's-over-but-I-want-you-anyway—/At the deck, nurses white and name-plated. . . ." At other times, chopped and opened up, not even a sentence survives intact. Restless with complacency and restriction, this book riccochets among a multitude of forms, tones, subjects. Boneshaker is a fierce, intelligent, terrifying interrogation of categories, among them the category of the book itself. Nothing is beyond the reach of this splendid new work. There is a school of poetry where the poems have content, where they communicate, where beauty is not forgotten. It is about work, family, and the lost towns. Grief. Jan is a central figure in this school. This is slap in the face, wake the fuck up and smell the roses poetry. This is pay attention Bub, or you'll be in a jam poetry; poetry written in defiance of gravity and in the face of all the forces of our own desire that want to drag us down. And underneath all of this wildness is a true love and care for craft, and the anxious, bluesy rhythm of good talk, like a river. 'Wild girl fire' is what Jan Beatty calls it, 'that white-hot tearing' that ignites into art or self-destruction. Poetry against all odds. Poetry as the death-defying act. Poetry as the wild choice for a girl running reckless from the working class. Between odd jobs and odd loves, Beatty writes from the tender heart without flinching. Language that's often raw but honest, fresh and real (not to mention quite beautiful at times) ... Buy it. Her writing style ... reflects a down-to-earth woman concerned with humanity. The book is gritty, powerful, subtly humorous and always compelling, the work of a truly skilled, compassionate and sophisticated poet. ... rife with the high stakes and rhythmic velocity of an urgent message. Even the way the poems look on the page demands that the reader listen up. These new poems are infused with a hit-the-road, rock 'n' roll spirit ... but on a deeper level, this rebelliousness becomes the ethos with which Beatty challenges American mores. ... her poems appeal to the heart and the ear. Beatty writes poems that tremble and roar. . . . powerful portraits of a brutal world colored by the light of the generous spirits moving within these poems. Beatty asks, 'Have you found a way / to walk around the world, have you / found a way to negotiate the pain?' She seems to have answered that questions for herself in poems that are carefully crafter, wild, defiant, and tender.