“These poems feel like observing a sunset sky, with all its transient, sublime beauty and indifference to our small human concerns; in them Piccinnini masters both the fleeting image and the permanent impression it leaves.”– Niina Pollari

“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.”– Calvin Bedient

“Embracing both 'viral meaning’ and ‘private dreaming,’ every poem manages to be simultaneously mysterious and revelatory.”– Brian Henry

“The speech acts in this work are so engaged with the struggle of speaking within actual world caught in finding the way to say that it’s often possible to see world’s fleeting moment. Could this be poetry’s highest calling, highest response? To feel so adrift and alive in the act of speech? We had our Williams, our Creeley, our Stein, and yet Piccinnini is so forward-falling, so willing to be lost and free from earlier forays into speaking.”– Gillian Conoley

Douglas Piccinnini has left the dream behind, the dream of a language that communes around yearning, “to go on quitting and find a new door / way to stand in to begin / in the hot ash of beginning...” I love this poetry that is prefaced with desire’s drop-out—starting as if from a farewell to “...today’s graft of / coughed up / meaning on meaning...”—then sprawls into the yawning ellipsis with Nietzsche-an aplomb, where the world is made like “an emptied drum verbs the air.” This is a new origin of things “...made / by what is missing...” This is Beautiful, Safe, & Free. – Ted Dodson

In Douglas Piccinnini’s Beautiful, Safe & Free we are past the logic of contradiction; the answer is we “prefer neither,” and violence makes irony hold its own hand—then twist it. “You must / be forced to be free.” One thing is clear: someone needs money, so the poet-gambler-hustler gives it their best shot, but the games can never be fun when “[t]oday’s graft of / coughed up / meaning on meaning / goes unnoticed.” By the book’s homecoming, the calamities of “A Western Sky ‘’ manifest as capitulation to the sputtering lung. At last one’s blood is usable, the blow lyrically deepened rather than stunted. “One is saying farewell avant farewell.” But in praying for a path through death, it’s prayer, not death that Piccinnini finds. – Jenn Soong

DOUGLAS PICCINNINI was born in New York in 1982. He is the author of Beautiful, Safe & Free (New Books), Blood Oboe (Omnidawn) and Story Book: a novella (The Cultural Society), as well as numerous chapbooks. His work has appeared in publications such as Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Dreginald, Fence, Fives, Lana Turner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Posit, Prelude, Tilted House, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse, Volt, The Volta and other outlets. Piccinnini has been awarded residencies by Art Farm Nebraska, The Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia, The Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, TN and The Mastheads in Pittsfield, MA. He lives with his wife Tara and their son Oblio in Frenchtown, NJ.