Pittsburghese

Pittsburghese is the language spoken in the pages of this poet’s singular concoction, a mix of keen musicality and uncommon sagacity that wound itself purposely and sinuously through my imagination like the twisty hills and bridges of its hometown. In the tradition of learning the sacred, secret loves of a burnished and bellowed metropolis, this poet’s voice masterfully testifies to neighborhoods and lives doused in enough heat to melt but then forged in enough wry and heart-busted love to craft the wiry steel of these poems.  —Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Robert Gibb’s Pittsburghese is an impressive homage to the “iron” city of Pittsburgh, its culture, its people, its industrial past of steel production, its subsequent economic decline, and its hard-won resurgence. Meditations, elegies, and ekphrastic pieces abound in which the poet renders in potent lyricism the “mills’ brutal music,” a muscular counterpoint to William Wordsworth’s “the still, sad music of humanity” from “Tintern Abbey.” Like Wordsworth, Gibb is a consummate poet of personal memory, specifically of his childhood and youth in nearby Homestead with its “crowded rows of houses [and] Steel mills billowing / Identical plumes of smoke.” His language is elegant and precise, rich with inventive images, such as the “auroras of white-hot scoria” of the blast furnaces. Gibb is the bard par excellence of Pittsburgh.  —Orlando Ricardo Menes, author of The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds

Gibb’s poems are so natural in their tone that they might seem like someone, anyone, just talking; that is, if anyone but Gibb could have a genius for lyric precision, a painter’s eye for detail, an impeccable ear for the music of his native dialect, and an unbearable grief born from the awareness of losing everything that matters to him a little at a time.  —Michael Simms, Plume Poetry