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 understanding of the often surreal, always paradoxical world around him. He explores the perceived injustices of childhood, observes the mysteries of religious rituals, and examines the complex emotions families experience as children grow up and parents grow old. These poems divulge an eventful life, compelling us to reflect on our own as we confront a world of wonder and uncertainty.
 Across the strike zone swoops a dove,
 maybe an angel. You’re in Pittsburgh,
 March; it’s snowing. All week
 you’ve seen angels; everyone’s tired,
 proclaiming even horrid things angels,
 intimating miracles. Johnson’s pitch
 obliterates the bird―
 a hail of feathers and dander,
 as if inside a tiny bomb detonated.
 Like a cartoon. Thoroughly unbelievable.
 Around you, people are dying.
 But you ignore it.
 You laugh at the massacred dove.
 It’s not funny, but you laugh.
 You could cry, rip your hair out, your clothes off,
 crash through the seventhfloor window
 into the slushy black streets of the city.
 It’s funny because it’s not.
 ―from “Angels”

The 13th Sunday after Pentecost: Poems (Voices of the South)

Literature & Fiction

Bathanti, Joseph

Poetry

LSU Press

Review\n“In Light at the Seam, Joseph Bathanti offers us a poetry of immersion reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins―a voice given weight, texture, and energy through a vigorous rhetoric full of physical grit, spondaic music, and lyric diction, often exotic in ways mindful of etymology and infused with a sense of wonder via bold figuration. I know of no other poet with a voice quite like this. It is singular.” -- Bruce Bond, author of For the Lost Cathedral\n“Light at the Seam is exactly that―the lit language of poetry working its way back into Earth’s deepest beginnings, restoring to our threatened world its dignity as Creation. Joseph Bathanti stands in the lineage of Hopkins, in and on the mountains of West Virginia, and witnesses both their beauty and ruin. These poems praise―the earth, the human, the divine―and offer a way to ‘look upon the earth’ that could be our saving grace.” -- Diane Gilliam Fisher, author of Kettle Bottom\n“Joseph Bathanti’s eco-poems simultaneously praise the intricate beauty of Creation and rage against the coal industry’s destruction of Appalachian mountains and Appalachian lives. 
His sacramental vision, his witness, along with his compression of sound and sense, are akin to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lamenting the felling of Binsey poplars, Hopkins cried out, ‘O if we but knew what we do. . . .’ But in this moment, we do know. Climate change tells us, and Bathanti’s poems show us, close up. In ‘Sundial, WV’ we learn that ‘children take sick from powdered coal’ and that ‘2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge’ are impounded in a slurry pond right above their elementary school. We see disastrous flooding in West Virginia when Pigeon Creek has ‘had too much to drown’ and in Kentucky when ‘a good house / built righteously . . . [is] swamped, then sundered, vitals bared . . . [its] yard washed off to Pike County.’ 
For Bathanti, as for Blake, ‘Everything that lives is Holy’―‘mossy black rock / pink angiosperm / lichen, leather-leaf / stonewart, ferns.’ Light at the Seam exposes the ruin spewed forth from the opposite outlook: Everything that lives is money. Greed and gluttony will get it while they can, Mother Earth, her inhabitants, and Mater Gloriosa be damned.” -- George Ella Lyon, former Kentucky Poet Laureate (2015–2016) and author of Back to the Light\nLight at the Seam, a new collection from North Carolina poet Joseph Bathanti, is an exploration of mountaintop removal in southern Appalachian coal country. The volume illuminates and champions often invisible people residing, in a precarious moment in time, on the glorious, yet besieged, Appalachian earth. Their call to defend it, as well as their faith that the land will exact its own reckoning, constitutes a sacred as well as existential quest. Rooted in social and restorative justice, Light at the Seam contemplates the earth as fundamentally sacramental, a crucible of awe and mystery, able to regenerate itself and its people even as it succumbs to them. More than mere cautionary tale, this is a volume of hope and wonder.

Light at the Seam: Poems

In 1976, Joseph Bathanti left his home in Pittsburgh for a fourteen-month sojourn as a VISTA Volunteer with the North Carolina Department of Correction.His new volume of poems, CONCERTINA,recounts in lyrical sweep his entry into the surreal, brutal, and often terrifyingly beautiful netherworld of convicts and their keepers. It is a world with one foot still firmly planted in the old chain gang, the other venturing beyond the manacles of history into a realm of second chances, while the country, in the throes of its bicentennial celebration, still swoons from Watergate and its aftermath. What's more, CONCERTINA, is an outsider's meditation on the American South and the power of place to transform not only language, but to instill in the speaker the impulse to tell the story of everything his eye lights upon. Indeed, Bathanti's world is as much about the geography, the very ether, of North Carolina, as it is about prisons. His voice is contemplative, poised on a tightrope of its own making, pitched near detonation.There are poems about the gas chamber, bounty hunters, bloodhounds and violence. But there are also poems about yard basketball games, the prison kitchen, Christmas parties, children visiting their imprisoned mothers, guards as undone by their lives in prison as the prisoners, and released convicts stumbling into society after years behind bars. Even Raskolnikov makes a cameo. All the while, the speaker is falling in love with another VISTA, a woman from Georgia. Above all, these poems doggedly insist that, even in abject suffering, sustained love and shared humanity supply redemption.

Concertina

Mercer University Press

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 its longest essay, "The Turf of Hankering," which tells the tale of Bathanti's leaving Pittsburgh for his VISTA training in Atlanta, meeting a Southern woman, and fellow VISTA he is destined to marry, his lurch into the American South where he would eventually make his beloved home, and his first attempts at becoming a writer. Written in a voice that is always elevated, though conversational, wry, funny, quintessentially human, and laced with poetry, the other thirteen essays of the book explore his early conflicted obsessions with Catholicism; Bill Mazeroski's famous 1960 World Series home run; a life-changing visit to writer Thomas Wolfe's boyhood home in Asheville; the Vietnam War; his mother and father and his Italian-American identity; the concept of work and what it really means; the netherworld of prison; marriage and fatherhood; his day as an extra in the cult-classic horror film Evil Dead II; and the unlikely path, ever unwinding, that led him ultimately to achieving his dream of becoming a writer.

Half of What I Say Is Meaningl

Essays & Correspondence

"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 feebly call Things That Matter makes it indispensable." - Sydney Lea, founder of The New England Review

Land of Amnesia

Press 53

A powerful account of Vietnam War Veterans recounting in prose and poetry their experiences before, during, and after the Vietnam War.

Brothers Like These

Literary

St. Andrews University Press

Joseph Bathanti: Twelve Poems: St. Andrews Review & This Metal (Digital & Print Chapbook Series)

Perez, Ryan

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Joseph Bathanti conducts a brilliant interview with his Literary Godfather Ronald H. Bayes.

A Conversation with Ronald H. Bayes in 1988: by Joseph Bathanti

Bayes, Ronald H.

United States

The beautiful linked stories in Joseph Bathanti's award-winning collection, The High Heart, bring us an ensemble of heartbreakingly vivid characters, headed by the young Fritz Sweeny and his volatile and eccentric parents, all of them caught in a weir of desperation, frustration, hilarity, confusion, and deep affection. The setting is Pittsburgh in the sixties and seventies, when the city still lay in the trough of industrial collapse, when the boundaries of long-established ethnic neighborhoods had begun to blur and bend against the pressures of economically driven population shifts, when Vietnam was gobbling up the children of a whole generation. Through the painfully honest perplexity of Fritz, we are afforded a clear view of the family, the neighborhood, the city, and the era. In the deftness of their portraiture and dialogue and in the depth of their compassion for the nearly lost, these stories invite comparisons with the writing of Nelson Algren, Fred Pfeil, and Kurt Vonnegut. And their loving invocation of a particular city, warts and all, will recall for lovers of American fiction the magnificent Albany novels of William Kennedy.

The High Heart

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

Coventry

Fiction. First time in paperback. This novel, which won the Novello Literary Award in 2006, hits hard and doesn't stop hitting. Bathanti surely drew on his extensive experience teaching in prisons to create a scad of unforgettable and unforgiving characters in an equally unforgettable and unforgiving setting: a prison camp. Cal Gaddy is haunted by his father, a guard who took young Cal on hunts for escaped convicts, despite protests from Cal's religious mother. And then we have Thrake, the hardcore sergeant who much resembles Cal's father and who brooks no disciplinary problems from the prisoners--with the exception of the camp's voodoo man, Pitch, a contraband dealer who keeps Thrake fearful of his powers to curse and maim. A bonus: Bathanti's prose hits every bit as powerfully as his tale and his characters. Here is a novel to awake each reader to another, darker side of life. Bathanti surely drew on his extensive experience teaching in prisons to create this unforgettable and unforgiving setting: a prison camp.

Livingston Press at the University of West Al

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