Poems in Which

Poetry. New to SPD. Previous winner of The Theodore Roethke Prize and Young Poets prize from Poetry Northwest, Joseph Di Prisco adds to his laurels with this new volume that won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. POEMS IN WHICH, both the title and beginning of every poem in the volume, claims for the form subjects as seemingly disparate as a spa and a white wolf, John F. Kennedy and Paris. Everything particular becomes the subject and domain of verse.

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  • “This is a joyous book. Even addressing unquenchable longing and the shadows of death and failure, the lyric engines of these poems propel us with vital combustions. Operatic, in that suffering and sadness are sung with the same gusto and octave-expanse as triumph and discovery, this work is proof of the presence of a large, funny and indefatigable spirit.”

    — Dean Young

  • “Somehow the speaker in Joseph Di Prisco's new poems manages to install himself in the kitchenware of contemporary culture without becoming a part of it. With a wit that questions as it embraces, Poems in Which provides us with a strong, original voice.”

    — Carl Dennis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

  • “Di Prisco mixes the immiscible: an authentic lyric voice and a sense of the self (and world) as dispersed and constructed. His poems are funny, smart, and moving; they quiz the options they exercise but are never coy.”

    — Guy Rotella

Tonight, even I can write the saddest lines

While she is luminally framed, ascending her stairs,

Going up always where endlessness begins.

So we’ll wash our dishes till sunup

And listen for the music from her forest of spoons.

Poems in Which

“Poem in which he attempts an answer to Pablo Neruda’s question—‘In the end won’t death be an endless kitchen?’”

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