Among Ruins [Hardcover]

“Once again Robert Gibb has found a gritty, searing, haunting, bluesy lyricism in the heart of industrial America. His poems remember growing up in and around Pittsburgh, where he still lives amid the ruins and art and photos and repurposed structures where memories remain most available, most scalding. Whether dealing with the danger of steel or steam, the inescapable clamor of machinery, or the shenanigans of youth shadowed and bounded by factory life, Gibb's fiercely elegant poems explore how a city, a landscape, a person 'could / heal and yet still be broken.'” —Floyd Skloot, author ofIn the Shadow of Memory
 

“'Pittsburgh looks celestial, hovering in mid-air,' Robert Gibb writes in one of the translucent poems that make upAmong Ruins. In this magisterial book, Gibb makes his native Pittsburgh native ground, art object, and myth. Whether recalling a gray childhood, jobs he once worked, or meditating on the photographs of W. Eugene Smith or Clyde Hare, Gibb gives us poems that can both tell a story and stop us in our tracks at an unexpected insight. 'This is the house my memory has kept for me,' one poem says, and we want to follow those words through each room of that large and varied house.” —Al Maginnes, author ofTaking Up Our Daily ToolsandThe Light in Our Houses

Robert Gibbwas born in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, includingThe Origins of Evening, which was a National Poetry Series winner. He has received numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants, seven Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, a Best American Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and The Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, among others. He lives on New Homestead Hill above the Monongahela River.