Blood Oboe

• One of Publishers Weekly's 2015 "Poetry Torch Carriers"
• One of Lit Hub's "Best Poetry Collections of 2015"

Cal Bedient in Lit Hub writes: Douglas Piccinnini's first collection of poems, Blood Oboe is poetry as pumped-up kicks. It transforms English the way a rope burn changes the way you feel about rope. Andrew Joron brilliantly reviewed the book in the journal Lana Turner, and I wrote the introduction, but it may not receive much attention, and not just because few books of poetry do, but also because it is rare, ferociously accomplished, difficult, aggressive, and crack-throated; it's not for sissies. "A sort of storm / verbs the air"; "the center is closed"; "To wait out / the lozenge of spit"--it's in that line, bitter as Rimbaud. Piccinnini may be a child of the internet age, but he's not buying it: "'I come out' / to you thru websites. / Websites? Websites"). He's not buying anything, not now, not with "everything titted up--unrhymed." His short lines elbow away comforting concepts. Life? "Our timed something." To me, his existential toughness is refreshing. No bullcrap. Like Ashbery he sees the basic insufficiency, the crying shame in the peculiar anti-phenomenon called time and in what still receives the name of "self": "my property of cells / my 'my' / . . . decharmed / . . . blood in the hopper." With his kitchen-Spanish inserts (Piccinnini is a New Jersey chef), he mouths "the air big air" in more than one language, but still comes away starved: "Life is 'terrible.' I get hungry: / it's time to punch everyone." Clearly the man can communicate and has humor. That he is difficult in askew, gnomic statements and abruptness I lack the space to illustrate. If anything suffices in or near the Piccinnini ex-world, suffice it to say that each of his poems is something to marvel at. He has arrived complete, "already late, dismembering."