In Transit (Hardcover)

In Transit, Nicholas Pierce’s debut poetry collection, charts the poet’s maturation across three sections, each centering on a different kind of love, from the pedagogical to the romantic to the familial. Form and subject are inseparable in poems that consider the complex power dynamic of an older man befriending a younger one, that draw on such classic texts as Plato’s Symposium and Homer’s Odyssey to make sense of the seemingly random encounters and missed chances that, as one poem puts it, “make up a life.”

As the book’s title suggests, these poems take place on the move, in cars, on boats and planes. They find the speaker abroad, as in “The Death of Argos,” a sonnet sequence that invents a new configuration for the form. Above all, though, the poems of In Transit attempt to capture a world in flux, turning to form as a stay against the transitory nature of experience.

Nicholas Pierce was born in Bakersfield, CA. He graduated from Texas Tech University and received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. During his MFA, he taught creative writing and worked on the school’s literary journal, Subtropics. His own poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, and Smartish Pace, among other places. A resident of Salt Lake City, he’s now working on a PhD in Poetry at the University of Utah. In Transit is his first book.