"In his title poem, Joseph Bathanti writes that 'Even a mincing moon off cotton will yield/light enough to walk by.' There is something of pale moonlight in all these poems, by which I scarcely mean that they are vague. Rather, things as ordinary as field cotton are seen in a way so original as to seem magical. The author has his rhetorical reasons to call this masterful book Land of Amnesia, but in fact that author forgets nothing. .... The delicious, full-throated lyricism of this volume would alone be enough to recommend it. That it grapples so bravely and brilliantly with what I must...
"In his title poem, Joseph Bathanti writes that 'Even a mincing moon off cotton will yield/light enough to walk by.' There is something of pale moonli...
"When an avid reader of contemporary poetry discovers a book so full of warmth and eloquent exactitude, she is grateful and excited to read more by the author. This was my first experience of reading Joseph Bathantis fourth book of poems, This Metal. I felt humbled by reading a poet whose voice was strong, but I was simultaneously dazzled by a vocabulary rich in metaphor and inflected by the language of faith and place." From the Introduction, by Mary Jo Bona
"When an avid reader of contemporary poetry discovers a book so full of warmth and eloquent exactitude, she is grateful and excited to read more by th...
"In Anson County, Joseph Bathantis generous heart turns the local into universal praises. Radiant as a welcome sun after rain, his reverence for people, places, and things fashions rare and extraordinary truths. Anson County is a substantive union of hymn and prayer." -Shelby Stephenson, author of Play My Music Anyhow
"In Anson County, Joseph Bathantis generous heart turns the local into universal praises. Radiant as a welcome sun after rain, his reverence for peopl...
Half of What I Say is Meaningless is a series of memoirs, set by turns in Joseph Bathanti's hometown of Pittsburgh as well as in his ultimate home in North Carolina where he landed in 1976 as a VISTA Volunteer assigned to the North Carolina Department of Correction. Though these essays are not queued chronologically, they form a seamless chronicle of contemplation on the indelible stamp of home, family, ancestry, and spirituality, regardless of locale. The book opens with "The Turf of Hankering," which tells the tale of Bathanti's leaving Pittsburgh for his VISTA training in Atlanta,...
Half of What I Say is Meaningless is a series of memoirs, set by turns in Joseph Bathanti's hometown of Pittsburgh as well as in his ultimate...
In The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, Joseph Bathanti offers poems that delve deep into a life reimagined through a mythologized past. Moving from his childhood to the present, weaving through the Italian immigrant streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to his parochial school, from the ballpark to church and home again, these contemplative poems present a situation unique to the poet but familiar to us all.
As Bathanti recalls the joys, struggles, and confusion of his formative years in the late fifties and into the sixties, he gains a deeper under-standing of the often...
In The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, Joseph Bathanti offers poems that delve deep into a life reimagined through a mythologized past. Moving from hi...