The Switching/Yard

In Jan Beatty's fourth collection she takes us through the ravaged landscape of the American West. In unflinching lines of burning lyric and relentless narrative, she forges the constructed body into movement. What is still stereotyped as the romantic journey now becomes as scarred as the Rust Belt. What lives in our collective unconscious as the Golden West becomes almost surreal, as these poems snap that vision in half with extended description of ghost explorers.

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.

Summary

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.

Product details

• Authors: Jan Beatty
• Publisher: University Of Pittsburgh Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.03.2013
• EAN: 9780822962410
• ISBN: 978-0-8229-6241-0
• No. of pages: 80
• Dimensions: 150 mm x 226 mm x 8 mm
• Weight: 181 g
• Series: Pitt Poetry; Pitt Poetry; Pitt Poetry Series
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies