The Switching/Yard (Pitt Poetry Series)
“The Switching/Yardis Jan Beatty's unflinching and unapologetic turn, a fierce conflagration of lyric and gorgeously rendered narrative that refuses to give the reader a chance, or reason, to turn away. There is no predictable rooting here, no way to dismiss these stanzas as simple leaps in the evolution of a starkly talented storyteller. Beatty's staunch refusal to bow to the ordinary—her ‘switching’ of gender roles, positions of power, or the very idea of home—infuses this volume with a brilliance not open to debate.”—Patricia Smith “When I step inside Jan Beatty’s poetry, I know I’m entering a place that is inhabited. I feel her presence in every space—whether it’s the ghostly train yard (‘the brokenness of a highway dream’) or a maximum-security prison. Beatty is a poet who speaks with courage and experience. Her poems are electrifyingly candid. Remember the scene inMommy Dearestwhen Faye Dunaway stares down the stuffed shirts of the corporate boardroom? ‘This ain’t my first time at the rodeo.’ Jan Beatty could have snapped that entire table in half with the raw energy of her words. In the words of R&B vocalist Carl Carlton, ‘she’s a bad mamajama.’”—D. A. Powell“In this aptly titled collection, Jan Beatty zigzags back and forth from mournful balladeer to hopped-up punk, from Pittsburgh smokestacks to Fresno train yards, ‘from wreckage to plunder.’ Full of Western vistas, dead-end bars, lying fathers, and midnight highways, The Switching/Yard is a ferocious post-post-Beatnik mash-up—part Bukowski, part Wanda Coleman—a barbaric yawp ‘lost in the big cosmic bath / where grief and ecstasy meet.’”—Campbell McGrath”Pablo Neruda Prize winner Beatty’s persona wears her mother like a dress (‘her neck a blue V / for her blue vagina that birthed six babies’), tries to buy a gun off a man who has ‘hurt people,’ and moodily declares that there is ‘nothing as lonely as / a crane not working.’ In short, she cannily captures a desolate American landscape, striking the pose of a skate punk kickflipping his board: ‘brilliantly indestructible’.”—Library Journal”Takes us on an unforgettable quest through two countries, through crack dens and ghost railyards, beat-up cars and rolling orchards, to the final soaring words of love and redemption. It is, in simplest form, the story of fighting to find one’s place in a shattered world.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette“There’s a distinctive voice, remarkable poems that arrive at distilled moments of tenderness.”—Pittsburgh City Paper