I am not a native of Pittsburgh, but I recently lost someone who grew up there. This book made me feel closer to them and provided me with poetic insight into the world of Pittsburgh. My favorites were "Homestead, ca. 1929. Oil on Canvas" and "The Etymologies of Rust".

This one is not for me. The formatting on this digital version makes it almost impossible for me to read with any sense of what poem I am reading or line breaks. I can't comment adequately on the substance of the writing.

Living just outside of and working in the city this is a book I absolutely need in physical form to share with the people in my life.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. Pub date: January 1, 2024

I was drawn to this as a Pittsburgh native, without knowing the poems content. Once I read the forward, I was even more intrigued. As someone who had generations of family that worked in the steel mills, and who’s family still lives in a once thriving, now decaying town left in their wake, these poems evoked a feeling as blue collar, gritty, and proud as the area can be.

“Pittsburghese” by Robert Gibb - (5 Stars) (Pub Date:01/01/2024) is a truly beautiful collection of poems that manages to capture the beauty, grit, coal smoke-scent of winter air, and glowing fire that is the Pittsburgh of my memory.

Good Things: Gibbs uses language explicitly to evoke all five senses. I can hear my mom say “why did you climb through jaggers?!” as I cried to pull them from the fleshy part of my palm. I can see the fiery slag pour down the mountain on my way to Century 3 Mall for my fall school clothes. I can smell the frigid-cold Pittsburgh air, with a whiff of coal smoke in January. I can feel the grit under my shoes as I walked through my great-grandmother’s sitting room on our weekly visit to her dark and dusty home. I can taste the Stoney’s beer in the corner bar.

Opportunities: There was not one thing that I would change about the writing or arrangement of these pieces, and the only minor issue I had with reading them was that the early copy I was graciously provided by #Netgalley and Wheelbarrow Books/Michigan State University Press had each new line capitalized, even when the word at the beginning of the line was not the first word of a sentence or a proper noun, which required me to concentrate on the poem's sentence structure more carefully. If this was intentional, then it was off balancing, if it was unintentional then I hope that it’s corrected in publication. Either way, it did not affect my appreciation of the work.

Final Thoughts: This collection of poems made me feel what art is supposed to make you feel. After reading “Musicology” I went and looked up The Blind Boys of Alabama. I had already read the poem once or twice, but after listening to the song with my eyes closed and my teeth clenched in joy, I read it again. Then I read it to my mom and listened again so that she could experience the joy. My mom grew up in Greene County just south of Pittsburgh, close to the slag pits in Mather, PA that still glowed hot decades later. Her brother was laid off when the steel mills closed. My grandfather captained a tug on the Mon, moving coal up and down the river, and my Great-Grandfather worked in the wire-works of U.S. Steele. I have a handmade bracelet he gifted my grandmother after some lockdown or other that I wore on my wedding day. This collection of poems is a collection of memories for me and mine, and the conversations and stories it facilitated this holiday season were incalculably precious. My family and my ‘yinzer’ friends will be hearing all about this, and I will remember the way it made me feel for a long time.

I appreciate the opportunity afforded me to have an early read of this story by netgalley and Wheelbarrow Books/Michigan State University Press. The opinions in this review are expressly those of ButIDigressBookClub and are intended for use by my followers and friends when choosing their next book. #butidigress #butidigressbookclub #pittsburghese #robertgibb #netgalley #netgalleyreviewer #arc #arcs

Details
Review Shared on Goodreads - www.goodreads.com/leah_cyphert_butidigressbookclub
Publishing Review 12/31/2023

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book.

While the introduction of the book seems promising, the poems are quite boring. Perhaps the specificity of this experience, the experience of a small industrial town in America that is mostly lost to time, is lost on me.

Artists like LaToya Ruby Frazier (The Notion of Family) represent Pennsylvania through photography and prose in order to illuminate the intertwined relationship between community, industry, and culture. Through poetry, Robert Gibb’s Pittsburghese (forthcoming January 2024, Michigan State University Press, Wheelbarrow Books) is a similarly earnest and successful attempt to accurately characterize a place and its people from a place of personal experience.
Born and raised on the outskirts of Pittsburgh in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Gibb’s work details his experiences in childhood and in the present Pittsburgh in four sections. He describes the effects of the steel industry on his family, on the landscape, and on his community.
When Gibb was thirty-five, his grandfather perished in a factory accident. In the poem “Century Elegies” he memorializes not only his grandfather, but provides elegies for “the waters that caught fire / That night, for the arks of that country / In which all nature was now a resource for steel.” Elegies for the imploding mills and the abandoned mill floors; elegy for his “half-orphaned father.”
He writes another elegy for the Cinema Paradiso in Homestead Park (“When the movie house closed down / I was lost.”) In “An End to the Marriage: My Stepmother Buys Twin Beds” Gibb mourns the end of his father and stepmother’s intimacy, and empathizes with his father (“How could she have sent him into such a day / Or I have slept so soundly, all those years, / Right down the hallway?”)
Gibb cannot let go. In “Varieties of Religious Experience” he writes, “All these years, I’m still clinging to things.” A poem called “Phone Booths'' mourns the loss of the space and criticizes our hyperconnectivity today: “Landlines, sea-floor cables, creosoted poles— / You were umbilical with all of it. / Now the thick world’s housed in a cloud.” Gibb sees the changes and knows he cannot do anything but write about those changes, and so he does.
In “Abbott Street”, Gibb reminisces over the town he remembers. (“Donny’s Bar / At the far end of the block, East End Avenue / At the other, the Midwest on our doorstep.”) He employs ekphrasis in three poems (“Home Scrap Project: Unemployed Steel Worker, 1987-1988”; “Homestead, ca. 1929. Oil on canvas”; “Worker, Steel Mill”), poetically riffing off impressions he discerned from those works to provide a comprehensive image of the people and culture of early Pittsburgh.
In the titular poem “Pittsburghese", Gibb approaches dialect as an inevitability: “You’d tweeze out any jagger tips / That had splintered beneath your skin. / The name itself still sticks.” Gibb’s acceptance of that fact allows him to diffuse eccentric language throughout the collection in a way that doesn’t alienate. Instead, the language encourages an exploration of words like “pizzle” “stippled” “quaffed” “sfumato” “miter-boxed” and “bivouacked”, to name a few. Gibb isn’t pretentious, he’s well-read and well-versed, and wants you to be, too. His work balances popular culture (“Sno-caps!” and the movie Vertigo) and the language of poetry (“Words in their traces when what matters is the flesh.”) through carefully curated personal and historical scenes.
Gibb masterfully crafts scenes from lines, allowing the reader to generate vivid and sometimes heartbreaking images. In the poem “Metaphysics”, Gibb writes “When my wife died it was vertigo / And those weeks through which I floundered, / Starting the day I looked out my window / And saw the rubble of clouds on the ground.” Reality disorients the narrator while it helps to orient the reader.
Gibb turns the dead into ghosts, which makes him less lonely yet more existential. “Those frayed-nerve mornings on the way to work, / My father would stop off for a brace, / The ghost of his Uncle Andrew leading the way.” The refrain of “Voice-Over” is simply “I live in Homestead with ghosts.” Gibb cannot escape the past – his home is entrenched in it, in those memories.
Gibb, born 1946, grew up on the outskirts of Pittsburgh in Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of multiple collections, including The Homestead Trilogy (1997-2007), Fugue for a Late Snow (1993), and What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979–1993 (2009). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pushcart Prize.
Of his writing, Gibb has said “autobiographical material gradually gives way, or knits into, larger, historical concerns and the preserving of cultural memory."[1](https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/Gibb__Robert) We see this occur throughout Pittsburghese, and successfully so.
A successful book of poetry will make you feel like you enjoy reading poetry, but it will also challenge you in some way. This can be related to subject matter, to form, to meaning, anything. I was initially challenged by the poem “Winter Nights Enlarge the Number of Their Hours” and the line “The clement soundstage heavens letting go.” But considering Gibb’s style and tendency towards merging the mundane with the heavenly, the line succeeds where it is in the poem. A less reverential poet would find it difficult pulling that one off. “Clement soundstage heavens”, referring to the 1940s cinematic quality that snow possesses when it falls at night, to me, is a remarkable associative assemblage of experience and sentiment, much like the rest of Pittsburghese.

I won’t be posting a public review of this title because I had to give up a third of the way through. The first third is a competent, if underwhelming, collection of mostly ekphrastic poetry. I’ve never enjoyed reading about visual art, but it did evoke a feeling of nostalgia for America’s era of industrial supremacy. It would have been a quaint collection, good for some readers, but not for me. However, I stopped after reading the Speaker’s defense of slavery-era statues. I’m already a little uncomfortable with works that argue to keep the status quo or lament for a time that was easier for the author’s ethnic/class group. Hearing the Speaker argue that a white guy who famously wrote music for minstrel shows laid the foundation for the greatness of Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles? I’m sure the author didn’t think he was being racist, but it’s hard to read about “cancelling” and redirecting credit away from classic Black musicians toward a white predecessor as anything else. I won’t post my negative review, but it’s definitely not for me. Just wanted to share that with the publisher.

“Pittsburghese” was a refreshing detour from my usual reading agenda. Robert Gibb’s poetic reflections on growing up in Homestead and working as a steelworker sparked fond memories from my time living in the ‘burgh. His social commentary as a lifelong resident overrode the nostalgia to remind me that—for good or bad—time marches on. This poetry collection is best enjoyed in front of a fire with a good merlot in your hand and smooth jazz in your ear so you can savor each stanza in peace.

Poetry collection featuring musings of life in Pittsburgh. Well written with vignettes of a past life.

As someone who lived off and on in Pittsburgh her whole life, Pittsburghese really brings the way Pittsburgh feels to the reader. I connected with this on many levels, the poetry is lovely and the book is unique.

As a Western PA native, where Pittsburgh is considered my second home. I found Pittsburghese paints the perfect picture of how life was and still is in the 'Burgh. This book portrays and highlights the lives of hard-working and blue-collar class workers. Every student who lives in Allegheny County needs to read this! This book will start conversations and will help many people understand how Pittsburgh became Pittsburgh.