Description
Poetry. "David Giannini's FACES SOMEWHERE WILD spans his 45 years in the Berkshire hill-towns of Massachusetts. Like the farmer whose 'face resembles what's fixed and moves around him,' he is an astute observer of other faces. The man-with-the-broom who walks the streets making sweeping gestures reminds the poet, 'We are becoming motes or star dust.' This resonates with the cosmic pedigree of the fallen drunk by the roadside: 'I drink the ancient atoms from a cask." Old Jane 'sees her dead daughter is a whitetail doe.' The poet tracks the faces he sees for traces of the original faces 'somewhere wild', the revelation of 'something you were before all else, / something you were before all this.' Giannini is the poet-hunter, who identifies himself as prey, in search of what waits at the threshold of expression: 'It wants to grab you by the throat. You don't turn away; /instead, you unbutton your shirt.' Even as he fleshes the world with words, the poet strips it back to a superordinate mystery of 'atoms in super positions / in two or more planes at once.' Giannini deliberately makes no attempt to resolve the paradox. Our guide through the Berkshires renders the vessel of creation as both full and empty. 'Feeling emptiness wing into you with its terror! Then owl to the empty nest. No reason notto have wept.' FACES SOMEWHERE WILD is a perch where the burden of mortality touches our hearts. Highly recommended." - Paul Pines
Author Bio
David Giannini's most recent full-length collections of poetry include IN A MOMENT WE MAY BE STRANGELY BLENDED (2019); MAYHAP (2019); THE FUTURE ONLY RATTLES WHEN YOU PICK IT UP (2018) (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award;) and FACES SOMEWHERE WILD (2017), (all published by Dos Madres Press) and Porous Borders (prosepoems published by Spuyten Duyvil Press in 2017.) He received Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Awards; The Osa and Lee Mays Award For Poetry; an award for prosepoetry from the University of Florida; a Finalist Award from the Naugatuck Review, and a Finalist Award for the James Hearst Poetry Prize of The North American Poetry Review in 2021. He also published three chapbooks during the first year of Covid: Viral Packet (Covid-related poems;) Semblance Vagrant (prosepoems;) and 10 Chapters from the Dawn, each published by New Feral Press in 2020-21. He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, and he taught preschoolers and high school students, among others. Giannini was the Lead Rehabilitation Counselor for Compass Center, which he co-founded as the first rehabilitation clubhouse for severely and chronically mentally ill adults in the northwest corner of Connecticut.
Author City: BECKET, MA USA