Boneshaker

"Language that's often raw but honest, fresh and real (not to mention quite beautiful at times). . . . Buy it." --Pittsburgh Magazine "[Beatty's] writing style . . . reflects a down-to-earth woman concerned with humanity." --City Paper "'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." --Sandra Cisneros "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. . . . 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." --Lynn Emanuel "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." --Bruce Weigl "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." ---Gerald Stern In hard-hitting, sophisticated, often lyrical language, Jan Beatty investigates the idea of the body as cultural machine, shelter, mirage, or home. She rescripts the birth scene with girders and industrial pulleys; the womb as inhabited by a young girl architect. Structurally adventurous, the poems in Boneshaker question icons and invoke taboos, connect desire with place and class, walk the tightrope between sex and love. Jan Beatty's first book, Mad River, won the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her collection Ravenous won the 1995 State Street Chapbook Prize. She has been published in Indiana Review, Witness, The Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and various anthologies. A resident of Pittsburgh, she is the host and producer of "Prosody," a weekly radio program featuring the work of national writers.