{"product_id":"the-switchingyard-9780822962410","title":"The Switching\/Yard","description":"In Jan Beatty's fourth collection, \u003ci\u003eThe Switching\/Yard\u003c\/i\u003e, she takes us through the ravaged landscape of the American West. In unflinching lines of burning lyric and relentless narrative, she forges the constructed body into movement. What is still stereotyped as the romantic journey--now becomes as scarred as the Rust Belt. What lives in our collective unconscious as the Golden West becomes almost surreal, as these poems snap that vision in half with extended description of ghost explorers. We see the open truck cab, the farm workers on the corner waiting for pick-up; we see the speaker returning west to find the long-abandoned story of the birthfather. There is no stable landscape here except the horizontal action of moving through. Landscape becomes story. In this extended tale of the idea of family, we find stand-ins for the father in the form of a hit man, Jim Morrison, and ultimately the unyielding road takes the place of the body. \u003ci\u003eThe Switching\/Yard\u003c\/i\u003e is at once the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where gender routinely shifts and switches, and the actual switching yard of the trains that run the inevitable tracks of this book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJan Beatty \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently \u003ci\u003eThe Body Wars\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eJackknife: New and Selected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her memoir, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Bastard\u003c\/i\u003e, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Prize. Beatty has worked as a waitress, in abortion clinics, and in maximum-security prisons and is professor emerita at Carlow University, where she directed the MFA and creative writing programs and the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Pittsburgh Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50924674220306,"sku":"9780822962410","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_503dd50d-e8d3-4223-994c-be7da12040c4.jpg?v=1738972712","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-switchingyard-9780822962410","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}