Phyllis Janowitz
Temporary Dwellings.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987. Pitt Poetry Series. First edition. 082293566X 77 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 8.5", is bound in green cloth, with stamped silver lettering to spine and ornamental design in silver at top of front cover. Book and dust jacket are new. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"The title poem of this collection is about a family that goes to a summer cottage each year with the certainty that everyone will have a wonderful time; every year various misadventures occur, but the family never loses its buoyant, if slightly ridiculous, optimism. That family, Phyllis Janowitz suggests, is like all of us, always believing that the future will be better than the past, knowing that the idea of permanence is an illusion, but living as if it \were not. If Janowitz's themes are ultimately bleak, her poems are not: knowing and fanciful, they employ a remarkably precise and surprising diction in the service  of an imagination which sees the surreal as our ordinary state."