cover image Nitro Nights

Nitro Nights

W.S. Di Piero. Copper Canyon (Consortium, dist.), $15 trade paper (65p) ISBN 978-1-55659-380-2

Di Piero takes the William Carlos Williams maxim “no ideas but in things” and explodes it into a storm of images in this 10th collection. There is music in his layering, in how “turning wheels and wind-trash and revolving doors/ weave us into wakefulness or dump us into distraction.” And in poems such as “The Lives of Objects” he delves even deeper into the possibilities of the object, saying that they embody “some other life,/ the seagull skull, salt flight,/ speed and glide/ and baffled braincase/ holding lost fire,/ keeping its secrets/ beyond the time/ passing through me now.” Di Piero (Chinese Apples) writes with incredible energy even in moments of quiet—his jittery style of building poems gives them an intensity and creates atmosphere within the space of a single line. In “The Light Box” Di Piero is at his finest, meditating on anxiety and change while giving us “fog teased/ through streetlights” and “Humvee treads/ like mashed lizards.” (Nov.)