Pittsburghese

Robert Gibb is the author of Sightlines, his thirteenth full-length poetry collection and winner of the 2019 Prize Americana for Poetry. Other books include Among Ruins, which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017; After, which won the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for 2016; and The Origins of Evening, which was a National Poetry Series selection. He has been awarded two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei and Strousse Awards.

Pittsburghese is the language spoken in the pages of this poet’s singular concoction, a mix of keen musicality and uncommon sagacity that wound itself purposely and sinuously through my imagination like the twisty hills and bridges of its hometown. In the tradition of learning the sacred, secret loves of a burnished and bellowed metropolis, this poet’s voice masterfully testifies to neighborhoods and lives doused in enough heat to melt but then forged in enough wry and heart-busted love to craft the wiry steel of these poems. —Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Robert Gibb’s Pittsburghese is an impressive homage to the “iron” city of Pittsburgh, its culture, its people, its industrial past of steel production, its subsequent economic decline, and its hard-won resurgence. Meditations, elegies, and ekphrastic pieces abound in which the poet renders in potent lyricism the “mills’ brutal music,” a muscular counterpoint to William Wordsworth’s “the still, sad music of humanity” from “Tintern Abbey.” Like Wordsworth, Gibb is a consummate poet of personal memory, specifically of his childhood and youth in nearby Homestead with its “crowded rows of houses [and] Steel mills billowing / Identical plumes of smoke.” His language is elegant and precise, rich with inventive images, such as the “auroras of white-hot scoria” of the blast furnaces. Gibb is the bard par excellence of Pittsburgh. —Orlando Ricardo Menes, author of The Gospel of Wildflowers and WeedsGibb’s poems are so natural in their tone that they might seem like someone, anyone, just talking; that is, if anyone but Gibb could have a genius for lyric precision, a painter’s eye for detail, an impeccable ear for the music of his native dialect, and an unbearable grief born from the awareness of losing everything that matters to him a little at a time. —Michael Simms, Plume Poetry

• Contents I The Pittsburgh Athletic Association Deskulling the Slag Pots Home Scrap Project: Unemployed Steel Worker, 1987–1988 Musicology Impulse! Last Round: For Rufus Harley Homestead, ca. 1929. Oil on Canvas Worker, Steel Mill The Immanence of 78s On the Removal of the Stephen Foster Statue from Schenley Plaza in Pittsburgh II The Etymologies of Rust Pittsburghese The Play of Memory in Childhood Spaces Phone Booths Telling Time Winter Nights Enlarge the Number of Their Hours Abbott Street Metaphysics Timelines Elegy for the Park Theater III All Hallows Joining the Congregation St. Joseph, Abscondus Voice-Over An End of the Marriage: My Stepmother Buys Twin Beds The Hall Mirror Home Movies Monostiches Varieties of Religious Experience Frances Perkins at the Homestead Post Office IV Bildungsroman The Age of Innocence Park Elementary Summa Theologiae Coal Stove Vandals Deer Season Skinhead Skunk Journal Century Elegies Notes Acknowledgments Series Acknowledgments