Pittsburgh Lit: Two Poetry Collections to Explore This July

“Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing”

Lynn Emanuel

University of Pittsburgh Press, $18

Lynn Emanuel writes tightly coiled poems that writhe and click like a simmering swarm. There is rage and sadness in her work but also an undercurrent of desperate self-preservation.

Her latest collection, “Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing,” revisits familiar territory for the poet. There are bracing poems about her artist father, who she describes as “the unclosed cut of me,” and Film Noir, a favorite of the poet, proliferates as a theme while providing tone and color for the book as a whole.

But here we also have the recent pandemic, which grabs the gulf between life and death and emulsifies these twin poles of existence until we can no longer be sure where one ends and the other begins. It’s strong stuff and surely some of Emanuel’s finest work.

“Pretend the Ball Is Named Jim Crow: The Story of Josh Gibson”

Dorian Hairston

The University Press of Kentucky, $21.95

Josh Gibson died in 1947 at the age of 35. The Negro League legend was physically depleted and shouldering a 17-year-old heartbreak — his wife died giving birth to their twin children when they were both still teenagers.

Dorian Hairston’s excellent debut poetry collection, “Pretend the Ball Is Named Jim Crow: The Story of Josh Gibson,” tells the life story of the former catcher who played for both the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords legendary teams and, in the process, racked up 800 home runs and set several batting marks that, thanks to a recent change in baseball’s official statistics, now stand as all-time records.

Hairston’s poems inhabit the voice of Gibson himself as well as his wife and children in a series of illuminating persona poems. Satchel Paige and Hooks Tinker, ballplayers who shared the diamond with Gibson, also make appearances. Hairston lets Tinker put the game in context: “it ain’t baseball / we offer folk / when they lay down their money / to watch some Black Ball. // we offer up the one place / where we all agree / a Negro ain’t nothing / but a man.”

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