Bøger af Jan Beatty

Rescripting the Ecstatic in the Midst of Violence

American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continentsand continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who's won three Stanley Cupsand her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story, but the real story, where Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as expected payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the ';chosen baby.' This journey into the relationship of place and body compels and unhinges, with the link between identity and blood history as its driving force. Beatty rescripts the order of things: the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where names and blood shift and revolt, and the actual story into the relationship of place and the insurrection of the body erased. Issues of class and struggle run throughout this book, this narrative river between blood and continents, between work and desire.

Winner of the 1994 Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize and the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

These roiling poems smack into walls of meditation, only to slide down the smooth concrete into the flatline of joy.

Since its inception in 1967, the ""Pitt Poetry Series"" has been a vehicle for America's finest contemporary poets including Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, and, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser. This work is a collection of the best work from this series.

The Switching/Yard deals with the horizontal worlds of the birth table, the continuum of gender roles, and the head-on landscape of power and home as seen through the train yards of the West.

In her third collection, Beatty travels inside the body to the blood that codes us, moving beyond the language of post-confessionialism into fourth-wave feminism, challenging notions of the "romantic" "and the "brutal" and how they exist within us and between us.

In Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and collisions of over twenty years of work. The new poems leap imagistically from the known world to the purely imagined, as in the voice in "Abortion with Gun Barrel": "I am the counselor,/there are cracks in the barrel of the gun/there is aiming/shots of sorrow-/ shots of light."