Praise for Beautiful, Safe & Free
In Douglas Piccinnini’s poetry, thinking, writing, and carrying on with the mysterious business of living are indivisible. His spare lyricism savors “the tang / of thought” as it contemplates identity and suffering in a world of our constant construction. The fragmentation, unexpected juxtapositions, and non-sequiturs which animate his “letters to stave off the abyss” jolt us into noticing the paradoxes and laughable, weepable absurdities at the heart of existence. Although his graceful, innovative verse never cabins its discomfiting revelations with facile closure, Piccinnini’s conversational voice is more friendly than forbidding. Warmed by humor as well as pain, this is challenging work that invites the reader to participate with an active mind in transmogrifying the confusing overwhelm of living into poetry.
– Susan Lewis, author of Zoom and Editor-in-chief of Posit
Piccinnini composes his poem-clusters out of scraps and fragments around placement and uncertainty, declaring where he, the narrator, is situated in this montage of contemporary America, through all its devastation, contradiction and absolute beauty. “one is a mind in refrain shelving the days,” he writes, to open the poem “FLOWER SHIELD,” “as the throat of where you’ve been speaks // as the once between of boundaries / becomes particular to retain an abandon [.]” Piccinnini’s poems appear to skim across an endless surface but instead reveal such depths as can’t be fathomed, offering echoes of Canadian poet Hugh Thomas through how the accumulation of ellipses can provide a perfect outline of an articulated absence.
Praise for Story Book
Story Book suspends and electrifies narration mid-creation. Story Book explores narrative of self-imposed amnesia, bloody encounters at home and on the road, Oedipal rage, suburban cocoons and the anxiety of marriage, male sexuality and therapy sessions gone awry, Catholic school and homosociality, confrontations with love, death, and surveillance, and of course, the purported cure-all of worst-case scenario guides.
– Rita Banerjee, Los Angeles Review of Books
Story Book shows us how the poet's conception of a text as self-sustaining can inform the genre of the novel or novella. Like different sections of a long poem, these chapters form a mosaic that suggests new ways of thinking about thinking about the world and writing.
Praise for Blood Oboe
One of “The Best Poetry Collections of 2015”
– LitHub.com
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."
- Calvin Bedient, LitHub.com
Douglas Piccinnini is a poet who causes space—verbal, figural space—to contract, inducing a negative lyric that reverses the expansive release characteristic of positive versions of poetic epiphany.
- Andrew Joron, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry And Opinion
The poems in Blood Oboe dwell in loss of faith, in frustration of the vanishing pastoral, and the new currency of the digital age.
- Krisy Paredes, Radius Magazine