Among Ruins

"Hailing from Homestead, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, the man makes poetry from ore and fire, slag and steel: from boyhood memories of small-city America to the middlish, late years of the twentieth century—the length of time it takes for a prosperous city to go through hell and begin a climb back. This collection is the fourth and final volume of Robert Gibb's study of his old industrial steel town." —ForeWord Reviews

"Once again Robert Gibb has found a gritty, searing, haunting, bluesy lyricism in the heart of industrial America. His poems remember growing up in and around Pittsburgh, where he still lives amid the ruins and art and photos and repurposed structures where memories remain most available, most scalding. Whether dealing with the danger of steel or steam, the inescapable clamor of machinery, or the shenanigans of youth shadowed and bounded by factory life, Gibb's fiercely elegant poems explore how a city, a landscape, a person 'could heal / And yet still be broken.'" —Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory

"Poet Robert Gibb strains to see what once was in his native Homestead in his extraordinary Among Ruins. . . . His neighborhood is a place where 'Pittsburgh looks celestial' and the memories of the locals are as haunted as the police station is said to be. . . . [Gibb] confront[s] the reader with the question of what becomes of our neighborhoods as the city changes. Which is just another way of asking what will become of us." —Pittsburgh Magazine

"I was lucky as editor of Notre Dame Review to have received poems by Robert Gibb one at a time for some years before I actually registered his stature as one of the best poets of his generation. I think I’d rather walk through Homestead, Pennsylvania, with Robert Gibb than through Dublin with Stephen Dedalus. I return to his poems the way I return to the great poets of place: Yeats, Hardy, Williams. I don’t just 'admire' these poems, I love them. I couldn’t be more delighted that ND Press is publishing his new book as a Sandeen Prize winner. I knew Ernest Sandeen for many years. This is a book that he too would have celebrated. " —John Matthias, emeritus, University of Notre Dame

“What makes Among Ruins a success isn’t experimentation or shocking confessionalism, but rather a reliance on clear-sighted memory . . . the distinctly wrought images carry a collection that leans on accurate representation . . . [as] he relies on precise language, a signature invoking a supple musicality.” —Pittsburgh City Paper