Pittsburgh poet Jan Beatty is a blue-collar bard, noted for writing bluntly in passionate, sometimes raw language, of waitresses and junkies, miners and steelworkers, not to mention sex, drugs, and rock stars.

Her first collection, "Mad River," winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett prize, explored the realm of the body through poems of pleasure, pain, child abuse, incest and death.

"Mad River" also launched her waitress poems, including "A Waitress' Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up and Don't Waste My Time."

"Boneshaker," published in 2002, continued this focus on the body, adding a bluesy wildness, an improvisational quality to the narrative. In "Going Deep for Jesus," lovers on a cherry red Kawasaki ride river roads in search of a private place to have "hard sex" on the ground until "we were the mills, we were the fire."

In her new visceral (dare I say gutsy?) collection, she goes deep inside the body and the intuitive self to write of blood in its many transmutations.

"Red sugar," she writes in the title poem, is "the sweet, deep inside of the body." This poem lays out a menu of images, beginning with a child as "a comet with an unending shimmering tail."

At age 6, encountering "a man in the woods, naked," the child runs:

"It's the body inside me that's running, my red sugar body that shows me the brutal road to love."

At 12 she discovers "we carry other bodies inside us. Not babies, but bodies of blood that speak to us in plutonic languages of pith and serum."

Grown up, working as a waitress, the narrator sees a woman she believes is her birth mother.

"When I saw her up close, I knew she was blood."

The woman denies it. And, both knew she was lying, based on the knowledge of "our inside bodies."

This new collection includes a string of bawdy love poems. In the opener, "I Saw One of Blake's Angels," Beatty writes of Eros encountered unexpectedly at a downtown peep show ("My name is Angela, she said, I can talk when I'm doing things, what do you want?"). She writes of female lust ("I'll tell you one thing: I like getting better than wanting," says the narrator in "To the Well-Meaning").

And she writes of explosive sex, up against the wall, after release from prison, of brutal coercive sex and its repercussions ("Shooter" inverts male violence, creating a fantasy revenge for a list of sexual transgressions that would not seem as shocking if witnessed on screen or in a video game).

"Red Sugar" reveals a new darker texture in Beatty's work, especially in the poems that deal with ripeness and loss. In "Serum," she writes:

"I wanted to be the red sugar of the pomegranate -- open me up & all/my beautiful seeds for you," but, the narrator continues, "in the hospital they lifted my uterus like a suitcase/of knobs & tumors, threw it in a haz/mat bin ..."

In one of the last poems in the book, "Shower w/ notebook," Beatty acknowledges her ties to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who chronicled the Stalinist terror, and to Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetry was informed with a commitment to social justice.

"Speculator Mine Disaster, Butte, Montana, 1917," her elegy to the 167 miners who died in an underground fire in Butte, Mont., the country's worst hard-rock metal mining disaster, descends naturally from Rukeyser's 1938 "The Book of the Dead," about the death of by silicosis of hundreds of miners involved in the construction of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel in West Virginia in the late 1920s.

In "Shower w/notebook" Beatty also tips a hat to her lineage of confessional poets -- Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds -- and reaffirms this lineage: "I first learned war in my own body."

This poem concludes with a wry note:

Beatty occasionally slips -- a worn line like "If a body can be seen as itself and love, it's a wonderful thing" doesn't measure up. But in "Red Sugar" she continues to follow her own path, defiantly singing the world she knows.