Di Stefano, Dante: Ill Angels

Etruscan Press, paperback

Published: July 16, 2019

Publisher Marketing: 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.