Sight Lines from the Cheap Seats

Sightlines from the Cheap Seats is the latest book of extraordinary poetry by prize-winning poet Joseph Di Prisco. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Dennis has praised Di Prisco’s “strong and original voice.” Dean Young, Pulitzer Prize-finalist, wrote that “addressing unquenchable longing and the shadows of death and failure, the lyric engines of [his] poems propel us with vital combustions”; his work “is proof of the presence of a large, funny, and indefatigable spirit.”

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  • “Sightlines From the Cheap Seats is a big book full of sharp, funny takes on directions, lists, résumés, mission statements―the documents that spread across our lives. The exuberance of Di Prisco's voice is exhilarating. He'll spin out an image or a catalogue about as far as it will go, then take it farther still. Puns abound. Joseph Di Prisco is the commander of the comic turn, the pasha of absurd hyperbole. No need for an appointment―the satrap will see you now.”

    — Don Bogen, An Algebra

  • “Musical, muscular, romantic, wise, Joseph Di Prisco’s new collection of poems, Sightlines from the Cheap Seats offers an expansive view of the landscape, taking us on a curvy trail out of the stadium that leads to our hearts and minds―a poetry adventure that kicks down doors to hidden rooms filled with sunlight.”

    — Kim Dower, Last Train to the Missing Planet

  • “Whatever else Di Prisco’s witty (mostly catalogue) poems may be about, they are first about language―how it rollicks and leaps, how it surprises, how it can hurtle the reader from one wild image to the next without even a pause. And perhaps, next, Di Prisco’s poems are about imagination itself, how a piano tuner can drop into a poem with his hero sandwich without warning, for instance, or one can find “a moose in the fridge.” The world of these poems is a zany world. The voice in the poems is young, energetic, funny, full of an “impossible joy"; it holds “nothing back.”

    — Patricia Fargnoli, Winter

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