BOOK LAUNCH! Frank Lehner, "Mrs. Nussbaum's Monkey" (w/ Jim Daniels)

We are grateful to host Frank Lehman and celebrate his debut full-length collection of poems, Mrs. Nussbaum's Monkey, a Pittsburgh pastoral with "poems that resonate with the pulsing rhythms of Pittsburgh" and "find the sacred in all small living things—insects, birds, flowers, animals." Frank will be joined in conversation by Jim Daniels.

"Frank Lehner’s new book, Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey, is a Pittsburgh pastoral. It is a love poem and a field guide to the unknown landscape that exists beneath and beyond the truisms about blue collar, industrial cities in America. Here, Lehner is the Whitman of his city. “I dress in the sacred garment of streets,” he writes. And he drenches those streets in tenderness, generosity, and a welter of unexpected detail. Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey is a tribute to the unknownness of place, of the many surprising places this industrial city represents. This book is an eloquent revision. A revelation." —Lynn Emanuel, author of Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing: Poems.

"In his first full-length collection, Frank Lehner delivers a lifetime of earned wisdom, humility, and grace, taking us on pilgrimages to holy sites where we meet his beautiful, flawed saints. The poems resonate with the pulsing rhythms of Pittsburgh, the city he unabashedly loves. He finds the sacred in all small living things—insects, birds, flowers, animals. There’s a stillness here in which transformations take place, a kindness which allows our shared humanity to be recognized and celebrated. Through litany and urban legend, through incantations and prayer, Lehner lifts us into a spiritual world where the potential for totems is everywhere. Every penny found is a jewel with its own story to tell. Lehner doesn’t imbue these totems with magic—he recognizes and pays tribute to the magic they already have: “The bumble bee on my forearm offers a powdery gold tattoo of her journey.” —Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy, Blessing the House, and Rowing Inland.

"I had death in my heart. I was set to clobber and smash.” This is an ancient lament familiar to the warrior. He protects his ghosts and labors for his living neighbors, redolent with story and song. He readies his table for “the sauce and stir and the dish to come.” In this way, Lehner creates grace and welcomes the stranger. I recognize the richness of dialect and formality in these poems and find my joy in knowing both realities, blending and reverberating." --Judith Vollmer Vollmer is the author of seven books of poetry including The Pavese Stone, forthcoming in March 2026 from Alice James Books.

"Novelist Nadine Gordimer once said, “The facts are always less than what really happened,” a sentence that looped continually through my mind as I read Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey, Frank Lehner’s out-of-the-wild-blue debut collection. At their uncanny, shaggy-dog, giddily gyrating best, these poems and hybrid prose pieces make “what really happened” happen right now as Big DickTeddy, Miss Addy, the legendary monkey Jessers, and many other singular characters come permanently alive in Lehner’s Pittsburgh, where “there’s always the wonder and magic,” where, despite everything, “We joy we don’t know we joy. We tomorrow joy. We death joy.”

—John Repp, author of The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020.

"Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey takes us into a Pittsburgh that’s gone but will never go away, a place of bridges and stairs and tugboats, Skookum Field and the Iron City sign, where people and animals that share their space negotiate daily to survive, and to survive themselves. With ee cummings’ inversion of language and a clear eye for the “beauty and indignity,” Frank Lehner demands that we see anew. This book of hours has space for legend, for angry husbands and practical saints and stolen dogs and old soldiers “trying to make sense of their stiff legs,” men broken by war and work whose ghosts can’t quit Pittsburgh any more than the living can. But grace awaits. We try to speak into the stone ear of God, when what we need is what our fathers taught us: “…the oiled glove, the small garden,/the clean tool, and sitting on a dock without a sound, watching a bobber." —Valerie Nieman, author of Upon the Corner of the Moon

JIM DANIELS is the award-winning writer of over twenty books, including Gun/Shy (2021) and The Luck of the Fall (2023). He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and his books have won four Michigan Notable Book Awards. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh.

FRANK LEHNER is a poet, book designer, folk arist, and playwright from Pittsburgh, PA, where he lives with his wife, the writer and educator, Nancy Koerbel. He is one of the founding members of the literary magazine 5 AM. His poetry has appeared in many periodicals and his plays have been staged in Pittsburgh and New York City.

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