THE MAIN STREET RAG REVIEW
A very warm review of Along These Rivers was included in The Main Street Rag's Fall 2008 ediiton. Special thanks to Richard Allen Taylor for the wonderful words. Here it is, in it's entirety:

I don't like all of the poems in this book, and I mean that as a compliment. Had the editors included only poems that suit my tastes—or tastes of any single reader—they would have missed their mark. Instead, editors Judith Robinson and Michael Wurster set out to create and anthology "more completely representational" than previous anthologies of Pittsburgh-area poets, a book that reflects the cultural and ethnic diversity of the area with subjects ranging from Godzilla to Groundhog Day.

Several of the poems remember the city's past glory as a center of steel manufacturing and subsequent decline. One of my favorites is Jan Beatty's "Pittsburgh Poem." It begins: On Sarah Street, on the South Side, / the old woman stand with her broom, imagining / the air full of lug and swish from the steelworker's boot ... // She thinks of the dark well of J&L, how it sifted down to nothing, / the mill's hole of a mouth that ate full years of her life, / nights she pulled her husband from Yarkey's bar across the street ...

Expatriated Pittsburgher Rick Campbell provides a richly detailed portrait of the city, its citizens, its geographic features and (we presume) his old neighborhood in "How the Streets in Front of Kaufmann's Department Story Tell Me I Am Home." For years I have been lost, he writes, as if jolted by the realization that he is back, where he is drawn to the deli across the street, to pastrami and Iron City, / where everyone eating big sandwiches is big / ... and their voice sing Pittsburgh when they say Iron.

In a poem dedicated to Judith Vollmer, Nancy L. Krzton's "On Pittsburgh as Poet's Canvas" provides a wide-angle look at Pittsburgh and surrounding countryside as Clear water from the north slips past the weathered hills and In taverns, millworkers drink with tombstone eyes, their children off to the promised land,/ while we are left in this Old Country of obelisks, churches, thin black seams of coal...

Pittsburgh's three rivers-the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio-appear in several of these poems. In "Lunch on the Monongahela" by Gail Ghai, the author compares a river outing to the Renoir painting "Luncheon of the Boating Party." The speaker imagines herself and her man to be a couple balanced on that boat sipping along the Seine. You suited/with a black top hat, I draped in pastelflowers. But this is Pittsburgh.//This is the Monongahela, blackish green as the slag heap...

Christine Tefler, in the delightful "Fool Moon over the Mon" invokes the same analogy with a slightly different slant in this vignette of a hot couple on. a hot night. He finds her lips and the small plastic/clasp holding her bra together. She tries to pretend/ this is not East McKeesport but France, not this man/but anotha Probably she will go through/life this way, enchanted, pretending, as if the moon/was not a three quarter moon, as if it were full.

Alas, Pittsburgh is not Paris, but it is a place that commands the loyalty and love of its denizens. And while many of the poems in this collection ooze nostalgia and even sadness in remembering life during the steel boom, there are moments of hope and joy as well. Marilyn Bates' "Sonogram, May 2,2000" is a good example. In this letter to her unborn son, she writes, LittleAlien, //...you take! . the first step onto the landscape of my cratered heart. Peter Blair, best known for his book Divine Salt, writes these tender lines: You lean/against me, your eyes luminous as the blue water. We look over the levee,/down into a stillness that contains us,/a stillness where a red filll moon rises/into the depths of the Allegheny.

Photo Editor David Rohm has adorned this book with a pleasing and eclectic mix of black-and-white images by many of the area's finest photographers. Many, but not all of the photos, feature things and places mentioned in the poems-the Pittsburgh skyline, factories, rivers, bridges and churches; people working, playing and dancing.

Along These Rivers is a splendid book. Much of the poetry and photography is about Pittsburgh, but all of the words and images presented are the work of authors and artists who live there or have some association with the city. This volume belongs in every Pittsburgh household and is a good value for poetry and art lovers anywhere.

— Richard Allen Taylor

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A great review of Along These Rivers is featured in July's issue of Pittsburgh Magazine.

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