Overview

Ill Angels explores the breakdowns and joys, the rhythms and reveries, the cul-de-sacs and jubilees, of early midlife. In poems that are at once formally assured and daringly inventive, Dante Di Stefano invokes the lives of artists, musicians, and writers he admires as his poems ruminate on love, death, music, language, and notions of national belonging. Fountaining through this book you will find: Louis Armstrong, Gwendolyn Brooks, the Coen Brothers, John Coltrane, Phillip K. Dick, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bob Dylan, Robert Frost, Guns N' Roses, Hokusai, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kobayashi Issa, Paul Klee, Dolly Parton, Pearl Jam, Prince, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gene Rodenberry, Sonny Rollins, A Tribe Called Quest, Derek Walcott, Phillis Wheatley, William Carlos Williams, the Wu-Tang Clan, Neil Young, Liu Xiabo, and many more. The poems in this volume range from nightlight to midnight moon to hospital hallway and back again. Written with a commitment to the hard-fought duende and earned communion of poetry, Ill Angels aims at delight, wisdom, and the endless sacred consolations available to us though words on a page and in the air.

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9780998750880

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Reviews

Dante Di Stefano's first book is absolute proof that poetry rises from the ruins. He sings of Binghamton, New York, and the hardscrabble streets where he grew up. He sings the praises of dumpster sparrows and anonymous saints most of us never see. He sings of his father, a postal worker for more than thirty years who died of cancer, the intimate objects and aching absences he left behind. Yet, if the poet confronts death bravely--even speaking in the voice of an unrepentant drone pilot--he also embraces life, the miracles of the everyday. There is music everywhere, from Nina Simone to Muddy Waters to Professor Longhair. There is the childhood friend who insisted, convincingly, that the baby Jesus lived in his washing machine. As the title tells us, love motivates the poems of Dante Di Stefano; love drives them to the page in the middle of the night; love will keep you turning the pages. -Martin Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Zapata's Disciple

Dante Di Stefano's first book is absolute proof that poetry rises from the ruins. He sings of Binghamton, New York, and the hardscrabble streets where he grew up. He sings the praises of dumpster sparrows and anonymous saints most of us never see. He sings of his father, a postal worker for more than thirty years who died of cancer, the intimate objects and aching absences he left behind. Yet, if the poet confronts death bravely--even speaking in the voice of an unrepentant drone pilot--he also embraces life, the miracles of the everyday. There is music everywhere, from Nina Simone to Muddy Waters to Professor Longhair. There is the childhood friend who insisted, convincingly, that the baby Jesus lived in his washing machine. As the title tells us, love motivates the poems of Dante Di Stefano; love drives them to the page in the middle of the night; love will keep you turning the pages. -Mart n Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Zapata's Disciple

Author Information

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the Dialogist. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018).

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