Paper: 978-1-61186-574-5 | eISBN: 978-1-62895-578-1 (ePub) | eISBN: 978-1-60917-828-4 (PDF)
Library of Congress Classification PS3554.A5635L38 2026
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
In poems selected from his long career, Jim Daniels focuses on Detroit and other Rust Belt cities, where issues of class and race and justice play out in the streets and kitchens and backyards and garages of the Americans trying to live and make a living there. Known for his courage, clarity, and accessibility, Daniels examines the tension between our idealized country and the messier cultural and economic divides, often focusing on those who can’t afford or have access to “magic.”
Jim Daniels has authored more than thirty collections of poetry, seven collections of fiction, and one collection of essays, and has written four produced screenplays. He has also edited or co-edited six anthologies, most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His books have won four Michigan Notable Books awards, the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, the Tillie Olsen Creative Writing Award, the Milton Kessler Award, and three gold medals in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, among others, and his films have won awards in film festivals around the world. His work has been published in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes. He has read his poetry on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, and his poems were frequently featured on Keillor’s Writer's Almanac. Poet laureates Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Tracy K. Smith all showcased his writing as part of their work to bring poetry to average Americans. During his long career, he has warmed up for singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, read poems at a Jamestown Jammers AA baseball game, had his poem “Factory Love” displayed on a race car, and sent poetry into space as part of the Moon Arts Project. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh, where he is the Baker University Professor Emeritus of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
“Jim Daniels’ poetry explores not only the realities of a blue collar, late 20th Century, upper Midwest childhood, but the entirety of America’s sociocultural whirlwind throughout these last six decades. Few writers believe more deeply in poetry’s capacity to document the world, and documentation, in his hands, is a form of homage.” —Campbell McGrath, author of twelve full-length collections of poetry
— -“Jim Daniels keeps getting better, going deeper into his lived life to find there the language of celebration, lamentation, victory, defeat, moral ambiguity, and political and social outrage. He curses what needs to be cursed, he blesses what needs to be blessed, and he stands in silent awe and wonder at the world turning about him, a world of unaccountable suffering and unaccounted-for beauty.” —Li-Young Lee, author of The Invention of the Darling
— -“Jim Daniels is a generous, inventive poet with great emotional range and insight. He is at home writing poems about home—the domestic space, child-rearing, marriage, aging, ambition—with honesty, intimacy, and grace….Jim Daniels is humorous, provocative, and smart—an American treasure.” —Denise Duhamel, professor at Florida International University, author of several poetry collections, including Second Story and Blowout
— -“The poetry of Jim Daniels springs from a deep well of compassion for the working class, their plundered cities and their plundered lives. His sharp eye surveys the landscapes of Detroit and Pittsburgh, his uncles struggling against alcoholism, his aunts scraping by on the wages of fast-food restaurants. His clear voice speaks for the fallen, from the company men who played by the rules and lost anyway to a child killed in a hit-and-run accident. Yet the poet finds dignity and redemption in the grace of baseball or the consolation of the human touch, spirituality in spite of churches, love in the mist of pesticide.” —Martin Espada, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, National Book Award for Poetry winner for Floaters
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