DRAGSTRIPPING Available: September 3, 2024 - University of Pittsburgh Press Dragstripping takes us to the literal dragstrip, the strip club, and the dragstrip of the body where the ecstatic is rescripted, where women disappear/reappear in the crosscut of gender. This transgression into and out of form leads to a tighter, more leaping poem that delivers the reader with more punch to experimental moments, pushing against restriction, creating deep, colliding structures between compressed language and an urge to move in terms of content. On a visceral, foundational level, the culture's unwillingness to complicate the idea of "woman" and all gender places an untenable burden, casting her into a restricted role that is impossible in its requirements. And unreal. Beatty writes the fractured landscape of the unknown woman, rewriting this crime scene of the body in war - with the missing or murdered as her own investigator. The investigation extends to form that's linguistically more adventurous, breaking rules of grammar and subverting expected speech. The woman knows in her body that the real/unreal are mixing here, and she finds elation in a strange and shifting land. "Jan Beatty writes at full throttle, a plunge into the self without flinching. These poems are highways, the finish lines smoking with 'the truth that drags and bitters.' Stories stripped raw. Brave, honest, death-defying, Beatty's poetry roars." - Sandra Cisneros, Woman Without Shame "Don't pretend you can't see this," demands the fierce speaker in Jan Beatty's Dragstripping. With unblinking grit, Beatty's malleable language and line - from narration to lyric image, from couplets to prose- affirm that "blues is three chords and the truth - // And poetry is long-lined lies and a deep dive / into the body's costly river." These astonishing poems have been captured in the very act of re-defining identity and desire, "because who wants a watered-/down heart?" In her eighth brilliant collection, Beatty once again proves herself a skilled master poet who sings of loss, grief, and trauma-but she also whispers a refrain of dynamic resolve: "Now I'm a heart without a head, walking. / I don't need to be right - / I just need it to be worth it..." - Ellen Bass, Indigo Jan Beatty has written a wildly associative and resolutely secular rebel's "lives of the saints" - one in which her love for the blues and rock music is continuous with her working class roots, and in which familial, communal, and sexual love coalesce into unforgettable portraits of democratic life on the brink of revelation. You'll find no stick-figure pieties or fool's gold politics here. Everything the poet sees, she sees with the precise eye of passion. - Tom Sleigh, The King's Touch Past Praise "Beatty's poems...shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters." - Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times "Nobody has a better sense of the colloquial American idiom. Nobody among her contemporaries writes better poems about urban working-class life." - Ed Ochester, Pitt Poetry Series "I love Jan Beatty's poetry. It is wild, erotic, and outrageous. She celebrates the physical, the sexual, and the abused, but her poems have a spiritual, if bitter, and even mystical, quality. She writes of betrayal, the ruin of innocence, false learning, delight, and pity. She is truly an ecstatic poet. She is also a good writer, with countless strategies, full of generosity, wisdom and knowledge. She belongs to no "school" but skirts-and represents-them all. She knows the magic of song. She is worshipful-and tragic. She belongs with Rukeyser, Olds, and Plath. - Gerald Stern, Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 All work copyright © Jan Beatty 2024