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1995. 96 pages.
0896723453
978-0-89672-345-0

Anna and the Steel Mill

By Deborah Burnham

This collection of poems is the winner of the 1995 first-book competition in the Texas Tech University Press Poetry Award series.

These poems about a young woman leaving Italy for the United States in the 1950s examine both the small town and urban landscape of a uniquely American experience.

"Anna and the Steel Mill is a work of great range and maturity. These poems are struck like matches—out of the small frictions in these poems arise gentle flames, but also raging fires."—Jim Daniels

Spare Change

Crossing Spruce Street, I was bending like a peddler
under my laundry and three loaves of day-old-bread
She held her sleeping daughter, asked for change for milk,
and diapers to soak up what the baby couldn't use.
I'd spent my change on laundry tokens, flat imitations
rattling in my hand. I offered bread; she needed cash;
we stared at the broken street, as if we hoped to see
a table spread with laundered white, with knives and baskets
ready for the strong bread that, broken open
would release a blessing in the smell of yeast.