Joseph Bathanti

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.

Steady Daylight, the latest volume of poetry from Joseph Bathanti, returns to the place he grew up, the now-vanished neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. The speaker traipses fearlessly between real and imagined realms, in the face of often conflicted sensibilities, secrets, and silence. While the physical touchstones of the "old" East Liberty have evanesced, Bathanti invents a world ample enough for the dead and the living through incantatory language thrumming with hope and photographic integrity. Ultimately, Steady Daylight is an elegy and a praise song, a heartbreakingly beautiful requiem.

Joseph Bathanti's novella, Too Glorious to Even Long for on Certain Days, follows Fritz Sweeney through a pivotal summer in 1973, set against the backdrop of working-class Pittsburgh. Fritz grapples with an existential crisis triggered by his job at Acme Toy Warehouse, which he finds absurd and meaningless. This sense of absurdity is deepened by his fascination with Albert Camus's philosophy, in " The Myth of Sisyphus" and The Stranger, introduced to him during his first college literature class by an enigmatic Vietnam veteran professor. Further complicating Fritz's life is his relationship with Claire Raffo, his mysterious girlfriend with whom he is precariously and hopelessly entangled. Throughout Too Glorious to Even Long for on Certain Days, Fritz confronts numerous moral crossroads, challenging his beliefs, understanding of existence and his place in an ultimately unforgiving world.

Emanating from a now-vanished Little Italy in Pittsburgh, this bilingual poetry collection summons back to life a "rough and raw" American landscape of a bygone era.

Joseph Bathanti's THE ACT OF CONTRITION & OTHER STORIES, a series of linked stories and one novella, continues the adventures of Fritz Sweeney and his outrageously memorable parents, Travis and Rita, that began in Bathanti's earlier award-winning volume of stories, THE HIGH HEART. Spanning the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, in an Italian American working class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, THE ACT OF CONTRITION celebrates and complicates the operatic glories and tragedies of an offbeat family that, fashioned from the vault of explosive family secrets, is snared in its own incendiary mythology. These fourteen unforgettable stories - a m lange of incantatory magical realism and clear-eyed documentary precision (in the vein of Raymond Carver) - are narrated by Fritz in a prophetic voice that issues at once from the very aggregate of steel town Pittsburgh and his deep yearning to escape it.

Light 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.

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

East Liberty is a poetic, passionate coming-of-age novel spanning 1955 to 1963, set in an Italian-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Roberto (Bobby) Renzo, the novel's fatherless narrator and main character, lives with Francene Renzo, his beautiful, mysterious, and unconventional mother who gave birth to him out of wedlock. Together the two habitually watch vintage Hollywood movies on TV. Orbiting Bobby and Francene are the Catholic Church; Francene's gothic, judgmental, Neapolitan parents; and the dramatically shifting culture at large hurtling toward them. While urged by the nuns at his school to pursue the priesthood -- though his dream is to be a big-league baseball player -- Bobby is drawn toward the temptations of the secular world, and finds himself involved in petty crimes and seduced by his awakening sexuality. As he emerges from his childhood cloud of innocence, his desire to know about his father becomes acute, and he is forced to confront the confusion and contradictions that rule his life. First published in hardcover in 2001, East Liberty won the Carolina Novel Award and was named a finalist for Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Award in Literary Fiction. This paperback edition features a new foreword by Fred Gardaphe, a distinguished professor of English and Italian American Studies at Queens College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute.

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

In a weaving together of contradictory realms - past and present, rustbelt city and rural/urban South, old-world Catholicism and backwoods Protestantism - Joseph Bathanti draws readers into the 1970s as protagonist George Dolce faces major upheaval in The Life of the World to Come.George aspires to leave his blue collar, Catholic neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. He is on the cusp of graduation from college and headed for law school when he becomes entangled in a local gambling ring. After his father gets laid off at the steel mill, George dramatically increases his wagering to help his parents with finances. What's more, he allows his boss at his real job and love interest's father, a pharmacist named Phil Rosechild, to place bets through him with the gambling ring's volatile kingpin.As his parents' financial situation deteriorates, George delves deeper into gambling, and he even goes so far as to set up Phil by using the pharmacist's unschooled and ever-growing betting practices to his own end - cheating the father of the woman he loves. When Phil welches on a large bet that George has placed for him, George finds himself in life-threatening trouble and must abandon his law school dreams. He robs the pharmacy, steals the delivery car, and flees south.After his stolen car breaks down in Queen, North Carolina, he meets a young, mysterious woman known as Crow. The two form a bond and eventually take to the road in an attempt to reconcile their harrowing, often surreal destiny and to escape George's inevitable punishment.

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 instil 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.

"Joseph Bathanti is a strong, eloquent voice in American poetry. His poems emanate from deep within himself and his culture, a world of rich ethnic ties and associations. I love the luminous details that he uncovers, again and again, like holy mysteries. His poems, which often deal - overtly and covertly - with religious themes, are restorative. These are, indeed, poems of restoration. Bathanti returns often to the well of memory, and he draws a fresh, sweet water from those depths." - Jay Parini The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems and Benjamin's Crossing "I am a sucker for Pittsburgh poetry, but it's not just the location that moves me in Bathanti's book. I like the two main things: the outrageous and amazing memory of particulars, of things; and the mad and tender turns the work suddenly takes. Bathanti is loyal, maybe grudgingly, to a dear - a loved and hated - world. Throughout the narrative, his poetic strategies are marvelous; one poem after another is deft, and moving, and original. This is an important book." - Gerald Stern Lucky Life and Bread Without Sugar "I am enraptured by the poems in Restoring Sacred Art, Joseph Bathanti's volume of love/hate poems about growing up and contending with the physicality of Pittsburgh, that unforgettable city. The language is rich, metropolitan, and accomplished, resounding with the poet's deep memories of friendship, family, neighborhood, school agonies, old cars, Catholicism, games, fights, binges, discoveries, hard jobs, affections, memories of a place and time. The stories and lines are artfully constructed, building to the moving conclusion of the book, when the poet returns annually to visit his people and remember the city. He never stops saying goodbye." - Paul Zimmer Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems and Trains In the Distance