<p>Appearing on the first page of Dante Di Stefano's <i>Midwhistle</i>, a flock of blackbirds braids its way throughout this book-length poem--an elegy to life itself. A sprawling, digressive love note to an unborn son, it is also a celebration of the life and legacy of poet William Heyen, a meditation on midlife, and an exploration of the food and fuel of poetry itself.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Di Stefano travels through a controlled stream of consciousness as he examines the weights of joy and grief. Bearing witness to the world, Midwhistle unfolds and refolds upon itself, touching on Hiroshima, Bergen-Belsen, Charlottesville, the sacoglossan sea slug, Darwin's Arch, and much more. Stylistically formal, the poem soars and dips, lightly and deftly finding the light in nighttime meditations, as the poet considers "our Unyet son, lemon-sized, / amniotic cosmonaut," while imagining Heyen at his own age, "the thin black necktie of your / apprenticeship had not been / taken off yet."<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> In these examinations we find the poet himself, faced always with a "blinking / cursor," seeking in the words and lives of other poets what it really means to write poetry. <i>Midwhistle</i>, in its meandering self-reflection and loving expansiveness, is a celebration of the act of poetic creation itself.<br /> <br /> &nbsp; <div>Remember, to be</div> <div>human is to be broken</div> <div>&, to be broken, is to</div> <div>see the almond blossom burst</div> <div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;under the closed eyelids of<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> your beloved.<br /> <br /> --Excerpt from "xxiii. (interlude: prayer for Gaza)"</div></p>

Midwhistle (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Di Stefano, Dante

Poetry

University of Wisconsin Press

<p>Ill Angels explores 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.</p>

Ill Angels

Parenting & Relationships

Etruscan Press

<p>In the third Tribus by Etruscan Press, we present work by poets of three generations: William Heyen, H. L. Hix, and Dante Di Stefano.It was Di Stefano's new book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, which inspired this tribute to three generations. Lullaby is deeply immersed in a soon-to-be-realized future, in which Di Stefano's daughter faces an array of 21st century challenges. Upon receiving this submission, we came to think about the concerns that have shaped the poetry of Heyen and Hix, our two flagship poets, and we decided that a Tribus, joining work which has defined Etruscan over the past twenty years, would be the best way to advance the dialogue. For the last half century, Heyen's poetry has explored world history, from Nature, to Native Americans, to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, the Iraq Wars, to the British Royals. His driving, eclectic force is unmatched in contemporary poetry. In this book, Heyen presents another entry into his Holocaust opus, The Nazi Patrol. H. L. Hix's work is also inextricably involved with the world, as seen in a recent collection, American Anger, which explores the psychology of rage underneath recent political turmoil, and God Bless, adapted from the speeches of George W. Bush and the tirades of Osama Bin Laden. Yet, his work also turns inward, creating new forms to join the world and the inner life. This theme is most prominent here, in How It Is That We. So, three generations look backward, forward,and inward. But chronology is not the most salient feature of this book of generations. Presented here are three books which thread through our sense of identity, being both deeply personal and also somehow liberated from the narrative of biography. Spare, profuse, elusive--these poems reveal how we are versions of one another while also that there never will be another. They present originality through which the prime echoes anew. The sensibility behind Generations is perhaps best expressed in a recent letter from H. L. Hix. "To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense; live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one's life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry."</p>

Generations: Lullaby With Incendiary Device, The Nazi Patrol, and How It Is That We

Self-Help

HEYEN, William

Hix, H. L.

Relationships

Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight is a collection of contemporary poetry by award-winning poet Dante Di Stefano, whose work has appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere.

Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight: Poems

Brighthorse Books

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