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Village: Recession by Jo Pitkin

Village: Recession by Jo Pitkin

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This deeply moving and highly accomplished book was surely written in a frenzy of making. Certainly, Jo Pitkin has inherited all the formality of line and elegance of thought that’s formed at an Iowa Workshop, but it’s her story, her personal myth of social history, that makes this collection so compelling and heart-shattering. Here is a fully formed poetic voice given over completely to great shocks of material, to deprivation and rat snakes, to the plundered pantry of a Great Depression, to fragmentary American survivors of ancient depression and rust-belt recession who float towards us upon rust-coloured waters. Here is work like no other American work since Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us, a brave survivor poetry that transforms us as we read.

–Thomas McCarthy, author of Pandemonium and Prophecy: Poems

 

Throughout Village: Recession, we sense powerful economic forces battering and reshaping lives in an upstate New York town. But there’s no vague apocalypticism at work here: Jo Pitkin never turns her eye from the local. All villagers—people, animals, birds, even insects!—are rendered with the kind of compassionate attention to detail that makes us both see and feel their existential plight. Ultimately, this is a book about resilience, including the poet’s own. As Pitkin puts it, “What is small and frail survives.”

–Clare Rossini, author of Winter Morning with Crow and Lingo

 

 

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Village: Recession

by Jo Pitkin

Full-length, Paper

Pre-order Price Guarantee until July 3, 2026

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This title will be released on August 21, 2026

In Village: Recession, Jo Pitkin explores the Great Recession of the early 2000s from the intimate vantage point of an American village, documenting the effects of this worldwide economic meltdown on friends, family, and neighbors—like the hardworking snow plower or the carpenter who never finishes his own house renovation in order to avoid paying higher property taxes—and on the poet herself. When the “recession’s serrated edge” profoundly alters her daily life, Pitkin finds temporary relief in small acts of kindness and solace in everyday encounters. Her poems not only capture the anxiety and isolation of being unexpectedly pushed out of the economic and, in turn, social mainstream but also convey with Dickinsonian detail the pleasures of ordinary experiences amidst the gradual contraction of her daily life. While tackling abrupt upheaval and contemplating how repercussions of economic cycles in history have shaped twelve generations of her family, Pitkin at last discovers the strength to endure.

#poetry #GreatRecession #EconomicDownturn #Resilience #EconomicRecovery

Jo Pitkin is the author of a chapbook, The Measure, and three previous full-length collections: Cradle of the American Circus: Poems from Somers, New York; Commonplace Invasions; and Rendering. Currently a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn, she lives and works in New York’s Hudson River Valley at the river’s narrowest and deepest point. www.jopitkin.com

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