About this ebook
Pitkin’s evocative reflections...are moments of time captured in the amber of poetic wordsmithing... The powerful, highly recommended collection that is But Still, Music should ideally be made part of any discussion group interested in contemporary poetry reflecting place, time, and life monuments. It doesn’t just narrate. It sings. —Diane Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
These are Anne Pitkin's interrogations of Loss, her moments alone with the Whirlwind that sweeps through human lives and systematically takes all that we love and cherish away from us. With fierce intelligence, humor, grace and great skill, Pitkin offers these haunting poems as her response.
—Jesse Glass, ed. Ahadada Press
But Still, Music by Anne Pitkin truly is a beautiful poetry collection. Rich in imagery, emotion, and passion, these poems are exceptionally composed. —Theresa Kadair, Seattle Book Review
There’s a fearlessness in the poems of Anne Pitkin’s But Still, Music… Nothing is off limits, and that’s part of the bravery of this collection… —Ed Harkness, The Law of the Unforeseen
Full of warnings, arguments, and reckonings, Anne Pitkin’s But, Still Music attempts to move beyond a mindset “pretend[ing] all is well,” whether in home, community, nation, or world… “It’s a long story,” she admits, how we eventually come to understand the past; how, in time, we see through perspectives not our own; and how we find mercy, acceptance, perhaps even redemption, as we move farther and more truthfully “into our broken-open world.” —Jeff Hardin, Watermark
About the author
ANNE PITKIN grew up in the South, Clarksville, TN, when it was still a small town. She attended Vanderbilt University when the Civil Rights Movement was getting underway. She graduated just after Bloody Sunday, the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Some of the poems in this collection are about growing up as a privileged white child in the segregated South. Anne moved to Bellingham, WA when she married and subsequently to Seattle, where she has lived ever since. She has two grown children and two grandchildren. Their mother, her eldest, died three years ago. Many of the poems here address that loss. Anne is a retired community college English instructor. She went back to school and became a psychotherapist, sometimes practicing while still teaching. She is retired from both now. She plays jazz piano with her friends, pandemic permitting. She currently lives with her two dogs, Riley, an oversized Pomeranian and Klaus, a mini dachshund. This is her third full length collection, preceded by YELLOW and WINTER ARGUMENTS, and a chapbook NOTES FOR CONTINUING THE PERFORMANCE. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Chicago, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, One, New Orleans Review, New England Review, Rattle and many others.
