Steady Daylight

“Plainspoken, set on streets with names like Liberty and Prince, the poems in Joseph Bathanti’s Steady Daylight travel through time, taking us back to a midcentury Italian American childhood in Pittsburgh, a vanished world. Every memory feels alive here. Bathanti has a gift for making the past present, his poems like brief requiems for the living and the dead.” ~Jehanne Dubrow

“What you hold in your hands isn’t simply a collection of poems; what you hold is the song of a lifetime, a timeline drafted in verse, generations arriving, generations given to the earth, decades of history housed by Bathanti’s loving pen. He gives us the full arc of a life in these pages, and we are transported, augmented, filled with the spirit of it all.” ~Brian Turner

“Bathanti’s wonderful new book of poems is filled with stunning recall, as if from an obsessed insomniac bearing a camera, revealing an old Pittsburgh, filled with ‘straphangers, cigarettes and slush / the bus finally [wheezing] to the curb,’ ever conscious of class and racial divides and annihilations that have existed from the start.” ~Judith Vollmer