What would it take to be home in one’s body, to walk around the world as oneself, knowing the pain within and without us? Jan Beatty boldly answers that question by making a fire map of the body. These roiling poems smack into walls of meditation, only to slide down the smooth concrete into the flatline of joy. These are vital poems of dimension, of both psychic and literal travel, of the elasticity of truth and struggle, of the daily nature of desire that brings us to our knees—then shotguns us back to the heart’s center.
 
Yellow Sky                                                                                                                 

The summer that I had nowhere to live:
 
the sky was yellow everywhere.
The cars of other people had their own private shine.
 
I walked slowly.
Several birds re-visited the backyards of strangers,
 
I was free
singing the song of the last thing I didn’t say to you.

"Language that's often raw but honest, fresh and real (not to mention quite beautiful at times). . . . Buy it." --Pittsburgh Magazine "[Beatty's] writing style . . . reflects a down-to-earth woman concerned with humanity." --City Paper "'Wild girl fire' is what Jan Beatty calls it, 'that white-hot tearing' that ignites into art or self-destruction. Poetry against all odds. Poetry as the death-defying act. Poetry as the wild choice for a girl running reckless from the working class. Between odd jobs and odd loves, Beatty writes from the tender heart without flinching." --Sandra Cisneros "What is the body? In Jan Beatty's courageous, beautiful, and harsh new book, Boneshaker, the body is as horrifyingly without boundaries as the cosmos, as constricted as a prison cell. Language, too, is a body. At times it is stitched up tight in the strictures of narrative. . . . At other times, chopped and opened up, not even a sentence survives intact. Restless with complacency and restriction, this book riccochets among a multitude of forms, tones, subjects. Boneshaker is a fierce, intelligent, terrifying interrogation of categories, among them the category of the book itself. Nothing is beyond the reach of this splendid new work." --Lynn Emanuel "This is slap in the face, wake the fuck up and smell the roses poetry. This is pay attention Bub, or you'll be in a jam poetry; poetry written in defiance of gravity and in the face of all the forces of our own desire that want to drag us down. And underneath all of this wildness is a true love and care for craft, and the anxious, bluesy rhythm of good talk, like a river." --Bruce Weigl "There is a school of poetry where the poems have content, where they communicate, where beauty is not forgotten. It is about work, family, and the lost towns. Grief. Jan is a central figure in this school." ---Gerald Stern In hard-hitting, sophisticated, often lyrical language, Jan Beatty investigates the idea of the body as cultural machine, shelter, mirage, or home. She rescripts the birth scene with girders and industrial pulleys; the womb as inhabited by a young girl architect. Structurally adventurous, the poems in Boneshaker question icons and invoke taboos, connect desire with place and class, walk the tightrope between sex and love. Jan Beatty's first book, Mad River, won the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her collection Ravenous won the 1995 State Street Chapbook Prize. She has been published in Indiana Review, Witness, The Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and various anthologies. A resident of Pittsburgh, she is the host and producer of "Prosody," a weekly radio program featuring the work of national writers.

"In every poem, she keeps her fury contained, but omnipresent, so that it resembles a cornered dog's warning growl, yet she hints of happier possibilities." --Booklist "Beatty does offer deeply visceral and sensory work, especially in the second and third sections of this three-part book. . . . She risks relative boldness and deep emotional commitment, disregarding political correctness in respect for this less readily sanitized realm of experience." --Publishers Weekly "Her poems speak to us head-on, with courage and a contemporaneous eloquence." --Yusef Komunyakaa "Raw, energetic, gritty, risky, sexy, and real. . . . The power of these short narratives is often cumulative, building a vision of the world seen through the eyes of a wanderer, a woman, a waitress." --Dorianne Laux Jan Beatty, winner of the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, has also won two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has held jobs as a welfare caseworker, a rape counselor, and a nurse's aide. She has worked in maximum security prisons, hoagie huts, burger joints, jazz clubs, and diners. Her chapbook, Ravenous, won the 1995 State Street Press Chapbook Prize. Her latest collection, Boneshaker, was published in 2002 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

“Red Sugar is tantalizing and forbidden, but it is no peepshow. The poems are raw, brash, and full of pluck, yet there is tenderness and honest emotion at the core. Jan Beatty reminds us that there is 'nothing / between us and death but one inch.' She takes us to the edge of being and shows us our own quick mortal souls. Yes, there's rock music and prison sex-but do not think for a moment that this book is merely licentious. Beatty casts a broad canopy over human desire, and within the scope of experience, she finds, too, that we are innocent and sublime beings. A rich, rare treat, this Red Sugar.” —D. A. Powell

"Tthe boldly sexual first person narratives in Red Sugar are absolutely riveting, artfully fleshed-out poems which generate fear for the character's safety." —ForeWord Magazine

"This electric, nerve-jangling collection revels in and sometimes rails against the glorious mess of inhabiting a body. The poems, in this, her third collection, are often raw, and full of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, but they're also shockingly soft and tender." --Pittsburgh Magazine