The Lady Pittsburgh

In The Lady Pittsburgh, Jason Baldinger showcases lyrical virtuosity. His jazzy odes riff on the rebelliousness of such cultural icons as Samuel Gompers & Lady Godiva. Hell, the eponymous Lady Pittsburgh could very well be Lena Horne reincarnated: a lead singer who has a soft spot for “the working man”; her cosmic voice, sending shudders through Urban Renewal’s entourage of petty bourgeois wolves. —Jonathan Moody, author of The Doomy Poems The Lady Pittsburgh is a post-industrial psalm, at once a long-moan blues and a boozy supplication. These poems exist in the overlap between myth and history, and that is where we discover truth, the place where all serious poetry lives. Jason Baldinger has crafted a spiritual history of our times with Pittsburgh as its moral center; a ragged and raging roadtrip to the absolute center where we find our Valhalla is a workingman’s bar lost somewhere in the American rustbelt. —Kris Collins, founder of Low Ghost Press “The years make things different.” That standout line is representative of one of the major themes in this, Baldinger’s first solo full-length collection. Baldinger is a poet interested in history and people—specific history but also history in general, and specific historical figures but also people in general—and the poems in this collection often concern themselves with time, the passage of time, and the change that passage of time brings... With this book, Baldinger has proven himself to be one of a handful of great younger Pittsburgh poets to emerge in the past decade. —The New Yinzer