Now in paperback: the "lovely and evocative book" ("San Francisco Chronicle") of poems both new and old that celebrates a quarter century of passionate engagement with real life and its transformation into poetic form: the pull of faith and the poet's suspicion of transcendence, urban worlds and the mysterious jazz of street language, desire and sexual need, love and loss.

"With language that's as simple as it is musical, Di Piero sets dazzling moments amid plainsong."--"The New York Times Book Review"

"Di Piero's poems throb with the intensity of urban life, buried anger, and old griefs that still ache."--"San Francisco Chronicle"

"Di Piero hopes to evoke something of the true mystery of present and recalled experience, and his poems powerfully enact this desire."--"The Philadelphia Inquirer"

W.S. Di Piero marries a streetwise, working-class sensibility to an intellectual rigor and precise language in poems that stare down depression, failed love, and urban nightlife. In a fast-paced, half-cracked/half-sane style reminiscent of bebop solos, Di Piero forges masterful poems that "keep it close, loose, and sweaty," and restore life's intensity while showing where real hope might be found.

From "Only in Things":

"Some days, who can stare at swathes of sky,
leafage and bad-complected whale-gray streets,
tailpipes and smokestacks orating sepia exhaust,
or the smaller enthusiasms of pistil and mailbox key,
and not weep for the world's darks on lights, lights on darks,
how its half-tones stay unchanged in their changings,
or how turning wheels and wind-trash and revolving doors
weave us into wakefulness or dump us into distraction?"

W.S. Di Piero was born in south Philadelphia and grew up in an Italian working-class neighborhood. He received a master's degree from San Francisco State University. His honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize for Italian translation. He teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco, California.

This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done you will die. But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead.The police investigation is inconclusive. However, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically, he begins to untangle a web of erotic intrigue and political calculation. But the results of his amateur sleuthing are unexpected--and tragic. "To Each His Own" is one of the masterworks of the great Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia--a gripping and unconventional detective story that is also an anatomy of a society founded on secrets, lies, collusion, and violence.

Explosive language, rough sensuousness, and an unflinching eye -- here is a poet who doesn't look away and is committed to poetry's first purpose: to bring song. "Tombo" is a book of lyrics fueled in equal parts by realism and big-fish storytelling, a book of wanderers, foghorns, summer rain, feral cats, and city jazz. Built on heartbreak particulars, these poems are raw, mysterious dilations of the moments of existence. Di Piero's work has been praised by luminaries of the poetry world like Philip Levine, John Ashbery, Christian Wiman, the editor of "POETRY, " and also by "The New York Times, " the "Philadelphia Inquirer, " and the "San Francisco Chronicle."

One of Euripides' late plays, Ion is a complex enactment of mortals' attempts to understand the actions of the gods and their own conflicted natures. The play's beauty and violence, its lyrical delicacy and nearly tragic action, offer a compelling view of the human condition.

The poems in this, W. S. Di Piero's fifth collection of poetry, are animated by an ancient vision of the human state as existing somewhere between the divine and the bestial; tense with the compulsion toward formal order and the wild yearning after chaos, these are tough poems, gritty and relentless; they indulge neither the reader nor the poet. Their austere lyricism expresses Di Piero's desire for transcendent meaning, and their unflinching attention to natural and cultural history reflects an equally strong instinct for the earthbound.