Energy Corridor - Pitt Poetry by Glenn Shaheen Paperback

About the Book

In Energy Corridor, Houston, Texas is the macabre avatar for a nation that has systematically stripped political and economic power from the middle and lower classes. In these poems the speaker wrestles with the guilt and complacency of living in the world's wealthiest nation.

Book Synopsis

In Energy Corridor, Houston, Texas is the macabre avatar for a nation that has systematically stripped political and economic power from the middle and lower classes. In these poems the speaker wrestles with the guilt and complacency of living in the world's wealthiest nation. It is easy in America to do nothing and suckle the trickling down of the rich, but these poems urge that we have a community responsibility to alter the way we act. Through varied lenses, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, from Goethe to contemporary electronica, from the 1982 Tylenol Murders to the Stanley Cup, these poems assemble the rhetoric of our cultural landscape into a call to arms. We must change our ways.

Review Quotes

It's a hard-to-accept fact: most poems written today barely matter, if at all. Glenn Shaheen's do. That's all you need to know.-- "Hayan Charara"

The American roller coaster of economic and psychologic inflation and deflation is Energy Corridor's timely subject, the city of Houston its genius loci. Glenn Shaheen brings a laser eye to national, neighborly, and personal iniquities large and small, because 'the direction I am trying to travel / is home.' Through 'measurements of stress, strata, fortune' this book bristles and pops.-- "Dana Levin"

About the Author

Glenn Shaheen is the author of Predatory, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and runner-up for the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the author of Unchecked Savagery, a chapbook of flash fiction. His poetry has appeared in Subtropics, /nor, Barrelhouse, and Washington Square, among other publications.