Pitt Books

In this book, I'm talking back the rhythms that were stolen from my people. Our society has suppressed the spirit of African Americans, yet when I look around me and in the media, everybody is walking, talking and singing like black people. ~Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman's poems are wildly complex in form and I will admit to only understanding about a third of the hidden meanings. As I read her poems I am walking down dark streets when suddenly I turn a page and I am suddenly at home with a series of words. Then, I am thrown into a word maze again where words like odalisque, pandemic and narcoleptic pull my eyes hungrily across the pages of hurricane thoughts.

Wanda is known as an Urban Poet who has a love for unvarnished truth. She comments on everything from politics to hot love. Her poems dance with their own rhythm and are especially beautiful when she lets her goddess out to play. She is known for being one of the nation's best poet-performers.

While the complexity is inspiring and Wanda's use of words, stunning...I was so happy to find my way to the humor in "The History of My Body." Deep emotions dance between her words and sometimes she blatantly expresses inner torments like when she writes: "I have wrung my heart/in secret silence." At times her words seem to roll in hot lust or spring from the page in a mind jolting punch.

Wanda's poems inspire me to write and write. I write my own poems after reading her poems and I am amazed at how such complexity inspires my own awakening to myself. I understand her musings on some primal level where poets sometimes live but at times her language flies above me and I can't grasp at the meaning no matter how much I try. Sometimes I am so pleased to understand an entire poem and then I can wander through pages before enlightenment strikes again.

By the time I arrived at "Soul Traveler" I was writing my own poems. That is how much this book inspired me.

The poems are challenging and interesting and the vocabulary and visual images are just stunning:

...in rainbow-colored moss. There she thrived in volcanic
radiance & iridescent splendor yet she pined for
another world made steel by her false imaginings & in
the pitch of her moonless golden-apple grove she danced
her dissatisfactions amongst ghosts...

To write this way! What a dream.

~The Rebecca Review

[ostinato]: a musical figure repeated persistently at the same pitch throughout a composition. -- Webster

Wanda Coleman has been dubbed the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles and with OSTINATO VAMPS she continues the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades. Her style is lyrically breathtaking as she repeatedly weaves voices and snippets of blues lyrics into poetic expressions that focus on the human struggle. Her words do both, explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes, but her fidelity to the truth is buffered by the syncopated way she delivers. The poetry and prose possess a soaring openness and a biting wit, where socially imposed fate begins to burn in the reader's mind at the indifference of humankind. The empty sadness in the title 'Olio Intaglio', where a mother is left to suffer alone over the loss of her son, touches on how family and friends can be the cruelest of them all.

One caption refers to her as the poet with a warrior voice because of her inclination to peel away polite veneer and verbally dissect the heart of issues. She artfully reminds us that life is unfair, but it still belongs to the living. If you have a penchant for poetry that is rhythmic but not rhyming, that reaches to the core of a psycho-social America, I recommend OSTINATO VAMPS. It invites the mind to venture beyond its comfort zone.

Reviewed by aNN
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

OSTINATO VAMPS is a gloriously ambitious book. Taken together, its poems form a visionary history of black, white, brown, and beige. Similar to the speaker in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," the "I" in these poems is a conduit for voices from the ancient past, the 19th century, the noir 40s of big band swing, the 50s of hipster bebop, and contemporary America. This is art as history redeemed: "aesthetics is the science of vulnerability/ bruises transformed, wounds immortalized..." Coleman is a virtuoso of many styles, laying down Thelonious Monk or Miles Davis, Robert Johnson or Billie Holiday, and sometimes rap or gospel. In a gorgeous poem called "Plum Hunger," she manages to merge W. C. Williams and Duke Ellington. There are people who still think Renaissance music should cue the rhythm of our poems. Coleman demonstrates that true American prosody is based on our native music. This is an important book. Do not miss it.

The female child of a white female outcast and a black freeman, the author gives a detailed account of what it was like being raised by a white family in the pre-Civil War North of the United States (a household where she was abandoned by her mother at 3). This biography gives a general idea of what a Negro's life in the North was like -- and it was not much different from that life of a slave in the South. The mistress of the house was brutal beyond measure, but many of the other family members were reasonably kind (though not kind of enough to put a stop to the abuse), and it makes one shudder to think of what could have happened in a family who had nothing but Negro-haters in it. Still, she recounts how she got a small measure of schooling, and how she eventually became a Christian (something which the lady of the house -- a Christian herself -- opposed) and her eventual marriage. An upsetting story, it is nevertheless of much more value than "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as it was told from the point of view of the victim and not a sympathetic white.

This book was written by a woman who was supposed to be a free Black woman. In fact she was treated like a slave, a Black wage slave. She was oppressed by a family of who were Northern Abolitionists. Yet, she was treated like a slave. Succeeding generations of whites studying the book denied her and her class the ability to write such a book: they claimed the book had to have been written by a white person and that it was a novel, not real.

Millions of Black women who have slaved in white kitchens and cleaning white homes during and since slavery have a spokesperson in Harriet E. Wilson. This book helps us understand not just to pity them, but to understanding their ability to fight back with their minds.

Though I currently have the 1983 edition with the introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (whose name is in the introduction for almost every important Af-Am text in circulation, it seems), I plan on getting this latest edition.

Until recently, biographical details on Wilson were limited. Indeed, they seemed to trail off soon after the publication of her book (a death certificate for her son six months after its printing has suggested to some that her call for support went unheard). This introduciton offers new and happier information, showing that Wilson lived a long life--in part as a successful lecturer on the Spiritualist circuit.

In any edition this is a great book. Really, "great" isn't superlative enough to cover how important and interesting it is. But if you're going to buy it, get this edition.

its a fair source of basic concepts, but lacks the true reflection of standard of difficulty of boards.if you are a foreign medical graduate and have time it's much better to use NMS BOARD SIMULATOR SERIES.

This book gives excellent examples of what you will face during the real test. It is a good guideline to show how you are doing in terms of preparation. It gave me great confidence which I desperately needed to do well on this test

I thought this book was a great review of Step 1 material. Has 1,000 questions with pretty good answer explanations.

I would not recommend using this as your only source of questions. However, it is a good question source for rapid review of a lot of information. You can get through the questions rather quickly. Offers a nice change of pace from the NMS series or Board Review Series (which tend to bog you down with long, very detailed answers requiring intense attention).

Highly recommend as an additional source of questions.

P.S. Remember, the best way to score high on Step 1 is QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS!!!

Ted Kooser's poetry is lovely. "Sparklers" on page 79 is a beautifully spare poem that really spoke to me.

Although I didn't think this collection was quite as good as Delights & Shadows or his Selected Poems, Weather Central is a fine collection of poems. I recommend "Four Secretaries", "In Passing", "A Statue of the Unknown Soldier", and "Weather Central." The poems seem to be a bit longer than what he usually writes, though the rest of Kooser's characteristics are here. He still is plainspoken. He is still a simple poet. He's still a poet everyone can love.

After reading Weather Central it is easy to understand why Ted Kooser is sometimes called the poet laureate of Nebraska. He writes with eloquence of barn owls, potatoes, spider eggs, sparklers, baseball and the prairie so that they matter to the reader wherever they might live. These poems do not rely on obscure references, contorted images, or pretension. They are powerful because we see that our own lives are poems that are being created each day. With 20/20 vision Kooser puts them on the page for us.

Readers of Maggie Anderson's work won't be surprised to note that the same grace with character and story flows throughout these selections. These poems are stately and intimate but with a kind of tender interior voice that maintains dignity and poise. Here is a voice that knows what it knows and tells it in a tone that makes readers want to bend closer to hear. For teachers, this is a good book to show how one can manage place and the way that someone who knows a place really well can move through the expository or posturing and into the kind of giving of a landscape to a reader like the best kind of gift--one that shows a sensitive knowing of what is needed and what will delight. A gorgeous offering--a true windfall.

Maggie Anderson's poems collected in Windfall are a masterful collection. I had the honor of hearing her read several of the poems, and her flat-toned, Appalachian voice really changes the more lyrical verse itself into something strikingly real. Ms. Anderson is amazing, and this collection will leave its impact.

In a couple of poems in Windfall: New and Selected Poems, Maggie Anderson uses the analogy of pearls to describe objects in those poems. As I thought about her collection of poetry, the analogy of gems and precious stones on a gold chain was the first thing that came to mind.

The poems aren't like pearls because they vary in subject and style. The jewel that hangs prominently on the center of the chain is "Heart Fire". The poem, written in memory of a young man who took his life, vividly tells how everything Ms. Anderson sees reminds her of his physical attributes. It is an amethyst because of its richness in color. "Knife" and other poems in which Ms. Anderson discusses her fear of her father are marquise-cut diamonds that have points to pierce the bubble of a peaceful world. The Black Dog poems, especially "Black Dog Goes to Art Colony", are black onyx stones that counter the sharp diamonds with their smoothness and warmth.

But "Literary" aptly described my overall feelings as I read this book. Ms Anderson said that when she read poems as a young woman, she struggled to understand what they meant. Some of the poems in Windfall seemed beyond my mental grasp because I don't have an academic background in poetry. Since I also am unfamiliar with many of the plants Ms. Anderson mentions in her nature poetry, I saw holes in the landscapes that she was painting with her words. Instead of giving up on understanding the poems that were perplexing, I reread many of them. I was glad I made that effort because I picked up on the links of the gold chain that thread through the gems and stones. Although a poem early in the book told of her father's death, the fear of him still lives inside of Ms. Anderson. Connected to that chain of thought are the poems that deal with her mother and other relatives., who are painted as reticent individuals. Blackberries stimulate all of Ms. Anderson's senses, and she is highly conscious of boundaries of every sort.

Although I felt Windfall was sometimes challenging, I felt it was worth the struggle. "Heart Fire" is one of the best poems I've ever read, and I feel my knowledge of poetry has grown as a result of reading this book.

Acharnians is Aristophanes' oldest surviving play. It is at once a bawdy romp and a stinging satire. Sommerstein's translation snaps and swells with Aristophanic brilliance. His Acharnians masterfully preserves the humor of the original and makes no attempt to soften or 'clean up' Aristophanes' rollicking obscenity. Extensive endnotes do much to acquaint the reader with the complex and fascinating contemporary Athenian political scene. The original Greek is included as a parallel text with numbered lines. The volumes in this series are well bound and make for a gratifying matched set.

His first surviving play, The Acharnians, was written in the sixth year of the War and, coincidentally, happens to be the world's first anti-war comedy. Inspired by the suffering of the rural population of Attica, the area surrounding Athens which was exposed to continual invasions, the poet built his plot around a hard headed farmer who, tired of the hostilities, determines to make a private peace with the Spartans. Denounced as a traitor by his fellow citizens and forced to plead for his life, Dicaeopolis turns to the tragic poet Euripides who lends him a whole assortment of tragic stage effects. His collection depleted, Euripides complains, "You miserable man! You are robbing me of an entire tragedy!"

Quan Barry's debut book starts out strong with the virtuosic announcement of her arrival on the scene in the form of the long, sectioned poem "Child of the Enemy," which deals with Barry's complicated childhood and ethnic heritage. She has a gift for dizzying shifts in style, form and syntax, careening from broken unpunctuated sestina to truncated fragments of speech. However, this energy only partly pays off: after the initial long poem, the book loses a focus and rushes along without a core, throwing in pop cultural references from Steven Seagal to Snow White and moving from plain love poems to, as the review above damningly notes, "oblique" showy pieces that turn out to be, ultimately, forgettable. But Barry has humor, vivacity and intellligence in these poems, which goes some distance toward smoothing out the flaws in this uneven but promising first book.

Quan Barry is an impressive poet. Her work shows superior craft, high intelligence, and deep empathy with wronged and violated people around the world. She always focuses on others, raising awareness about their suffering through her poetry. Our suffering, including the intimate kind. And what poetry it is! Her language is elegant and piercing, her metaphors beautiful and surprising. The Asylum has just the right degree of compression, built-in foreign words, a refreshing variety from prose poems to complex poem series, and a multitude of allusions to other writers, artists, and the Bible. It is a delight to follow her crafted lines (a real-life textbook on line breaks, dropped lines, caesura, etc.) and feel the energy in her images. For many poets nowadays, it is easy to spit on everything and everyone without offering any constructive way out of painful, pressing issues. Barry does not spit. She goes straight to the core of injustice and its consequences, and makes us aware that this is not the end, that "it is our right to ask" (Job 42.4, p. 18) and do something about it. She is the poet to follow - in every respect!

Very good resource, excellent descriptions and images of pipes in museum's holdings. Covers pipes from around the world, includes historical information. Avoids most of the pseudo-historical drivel that often obscures the actual use and history of the Highland pipes, as well as revealing to many for the first time that there are bagpipes from places other than Scotland. All in all, an excellent book!

This is probably the most well-researched books on bagpipes available in English. It covers bagpipes from all over the world, not just the British Isles, and gives a great deal of technical information concerning their construction and tuning. It is a reprint of an older edition (with changes), so some of the photos are a bit dated, but nonetheless very informative and clear. If you are interested in the history of the bagpipe get this book.

In the evolution of Jim Daniels's concerns as a poet, we see a steady movement over the last twenty years away from the struggles with the pressures of society and toward the confrontation with the difficulties of existence itself. Daniels's first two books, Places/everyone and Punching Out, illustrate the implacable reality of blue collar jobs. The gritty details of the poems are drawn primarily from a Detroit auto factory where the workers are abused by the bosses and by their fellow workers. His third book, M-80, shows the neighborhood where the autoworkers and their families live. There is no sentimentality here. The neighborhood is full of tough teenagers and wild children, and the adults are often abusive and ignorant. In the long poem Time, Temperature, the trust that the younger generation has in the wisdom of their elders is destroyed by the paranoid racism of the speaker's grandfather. This bleak view of urban life, and of Daniels's own childhood, is mitigated only by the rough love of family, but when family life goes awry, there is no balance to the harsh demands of work and the terror of violence in the streets. Dedicated to his two children, Blessing the House, Daniels's fourth book, has a softer tone. Perhaps the poet has temporarily made peace with the struggles of life, or perhaps he has simply created a safer and more loving environment for his own children than he himself had growing up.

A strong voice in contemporary poetry. Though his early works deal primarily with factory life, this latest collection deals with life as a father and observer. He captures the situations that go on around us everyday that we are usually too busy to appreciate for what they are. a brilliant collection.

A raw, true, fierce book of poems. This is daily life shown for all its possible visceral pain, minimally digested to preserve its immediacy and beauty. One doesn't just admire Beatty's poetry but how she has survived her life. She maintains the complexity of a situation as well as the raging pitch or surprise it has left with her. In "Poetry Workshop at the Homeless Shelter" for example: "So I'm the white teacher reading/some Etheridge Knight poems to the four/residents who showed: For Black Poets/Who Think of Suicide -- thinking these guys have seen it all and want/something hard-core, when a blackman/named Tyrone raises his hand: These poems offend me./They do? I say. Yes, I was raised/not to curse, and I don't see why/a poem has to use those words. What poems do you like?/ Langston Hughes./Yeah, someone else says, Jean Toomer, man. Tyrone says, Let's talk about calculating a poem./Pardon me, I say --/You know......Tyrone draws this two-dimensional/image of this three-dimensional grid, based/on numerology, he says, in which each letter/of the alphabet corresponds to a number. Look it's like you start with a 13, 25, then got o a 8,5,1,18,20 -- that's the start of my first line: "My heart opens to the new world" --See? I am stunned by it all -- strange genius/or just strange?..." From "Dear Mother, Machine,": dear keeper, dear appliance/ I went looking for your house today,/ the mother womb, for barren ones,/ where they make the ones like you. I always knew your eyes were buttons, the gleam not human, a patch/ crosshatch of light in the pupil, A young girl could surely get lost in there/never heard from again/never heard." There are many more raw moments than what I've presented here. Teachers: This is a book that would get an intro class' attention and from which they learn about bravery and passionate subject, as well as form, arrangement, voice, and innovation.

An unfliching book of poetry. Jan Beatty captures the voice over playing in her head, the thoughts behind what is actually spoken. Poems about her Father brought me to tears. They are a tribute to a blue collar man and the love he shared with his Daughter. A must read for poetry fans or anyone interested in living honest and true. These poems haunt me. They follow me around. They have given me another perspective on living in my body and looking at the world. I could go on and on instead I will just say READ THE BOOK