Poet and UT Alum Sara Bawany reads from her book Quarter Life Crisis at an event in the Poetry Center in April 2024.
The UT Poetry Center, home to the Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection, is a diverse collection of poetry unique to the University of Texas Libraries. The center is on the main floor of the Perry-Castañeda Library in the UFCU Room (PCL 2.500).
The Ruth Stephan Collection is more than 50 years old and promotes the reading of poetry for enjoyment and edification. The collection also supports poets from the university and the greater Austin community, and it serves as a record of small press publishing in Austin. Some of the collection’s chapbooks, no longer in print, are not found at any other library! The collection is meant to be enjoyed by all, including the greater Austin and Texas communities. Therefore, the books do not circulate and are intended to be available for anyone looking for inspiration.
Ruth Stephan's intention in creating the collection was to "maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry and to recognize that poetry is the art of poets, not of critics." It is our sincere hope that the UT Poetry Center serves as a place for all writers and readers of poetry in Austin and beyond.
Special thanks to UT's English Department for providing support and funding for the collection.
"Maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry and ... recognize that poetry is the art of poets, not of critics."
-Ruth Stephan
Alive at the End of the World by
Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses. In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us. Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. Viewing himself as an unreliable narrator, Jones looks outward to understand what's within, bringing forth cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and how perilously we've been living on top of fault lines. As these poems seek ways to love and survive through America's existential threats, Jones ushers his readers toward the realization that the end of the world is already here--and the apocalypse is a state of being.
Autobiography of a Semiromantic Anarchist by
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Latinx Studies. ortiz asks us to peer into the post-apocalyptic landscape of our times. The voice of these poems is ragged and sensual, wearing the scars of a life lived in protest just by loving. It seduces us with the tantalizing declaration that it knows "all the possible ways a world ends." Despite the promise of certain death, the voice still beckons, offering us the possibility being side by side through the blast, if only to face the end together.
Instant Winner by
A moving, authentic exploration of spirituality and the domestic from a prize-winning poet. The wry, supple poems in Carrie Fountain's second collection take the form of prayers and meditations chronicling the existential shifts brought on by parenthood, spiritual searching, and the profound, often beguiling experience of being a self, inside a body, with a soul. Fountain's voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the 'pure holiness in motherhood' with the 'thuds the giant dumpsters make behind the strip mall when they're tossed back to the pavement by the trash truck.' In these wise, accessible, deeply emotional poems, she captures a contemporary longing for spiritual meaning that's wary of prepackaged wisdom - a longing answered most fully by attending to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From 'Prayer (nice Job)' Today - everything in line, everything done in an orderly fashion, conversation with myself that ends with nice job - the baby sleeps and sleeps, her big face composed, her eyes brushstrokes, sweaty curls against her head. I want my heart to belong to God, but I can't help feeling that my heart belongs to me. I want to give my heart to God, but there isn't enough time. Or else I want God to take my heart, to seize it. Oh, how tiny I am in this heart.
Machete by
This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a thousand cuts. "Morin's writing uses the mundane details of everyday life . . . as a jumping-off point for creating fascinating and philosophical worlds." -LitHub "Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca" ("God squeezes, but He doesn't strangle")--the epigraph of Machete--sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an invisible hand at your throat. Tomas Morin hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore. In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling- "Whiteface" is a list of instructions for people stopped by the police; "Duct Tape" lauds our domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself. One part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Morin considers our obsession with suffering--"the pain in which we trust"--and finds that the best answer to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have.
Olio by
Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I.Oliois an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them. So, while I lead this choir, I still find that I'm being led...I'm a missionary mending my faith in the midst of this flock... I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter; they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather. Detroit nativeTyehimba Jess' first book of poetry,leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
The Tradition by
"By some literary magic--no, it's precision, and honesty--Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."--Craig Morgan Teicher, "I Reject Walls: NPR 2019 Poetry Preview""A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem."--Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown's "Dark" (featured in theNew York Times Magazine in January 2019)"Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men."--O, The Oprah MagazineFeatured in NPR's "I Reject Walls": A 2019 Poetry Preview" Named a Lit Hub "Most Anticipated Book of 2019"One of Buzzfeed's "66 Books Coming in 2019 You'll Want to Keep Your Eyes On"The Rumpus poetry pick for "What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner" One of Book Riot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019"Jericho Brown's daring new bookThe Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill.The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era by
Shirley Temple tap dancing at the Kiwanis Club, Stevie Nicks glaring at Lindsey Buckingham during a live version of "Silver Springs," Frank Ocean lyrics staking new territory on the page: this is a taste of the cultural landscape sampled in Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era. Chad Bennett casually combines icons of the way we live now--GIFs, smartphones, YouTube--with a classical lover's lament. The result is certainly a deeply personal account of loss, but morecritically, a dismantling of an American history of queerness. "This is our sorrow. Once it seemed theirs, but now it's ours. They still inhabit it, yet we say it's ours." All at once cerebral, physical, personal, and communal,Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era constructs a future worth celebrating.
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