Inside the Box | W. S. Di Piero | Essays
Inside the Box presents the record of a life lived in search of, and to honor, meaning. The essays, selected from more than 30 years of celebrated work, invite readers on a captivating journey through literature, art, and the landscape of memory. Blending personal reflections on his Italian-American upbringing with incisive analysis of figures like Dante, Van Gogh, and Coleridge, Di Piero illuminates the complex ways in which life and art intertwine. His lyrical, penetrating prose brings readers along as he confronts intricate questions of identity, creativity, desire, and purpose.
$28.00
Description
Inside the Box, W. S. Di Piero
$28.00
ISBN: 9798991957540
Fine Softcover; 320 pages; 6″x9″
Publication Date: August 26, 2025
Summary
Inside the Box presents the record of a life lived in search of, and to honor, meaning. The essays, selected from more than 30 years of celebrated work, invite readers on a captivating journey through literature, art, and the landscape of memory. Blending personal reflections on his Italian-American upbringing with incisive analysis of figures like Dante, Van Gogh, and Coleridge, Di Piero illuminates the complex ways in which life and art intertwine. His lyrical, penetrating prose brings readers along as he confronts intricate questions of identity, creativity, desire, and purpose.
“W. S. Di Piero is one of the best and most under-recognized writers of our time,” writes Wendy Lesser, author and Founding Editor of The Threepenny Review. “His prose style is powerfully attractive and unique.”
Author
W. S. Di Piero is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, essays, art criticism, and translation. He has been the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest award. He lives in San Francisco.
Previous Praise
W. S. Di Piero is one of the best and most under-recognized writers of our time. His prose style is powerfully attractive and unique.
Wendy Lesser
Mallarme said the poet’s job is to purify the language of the tribe. W. S. Di Piero does just that, mainly by aligning his rich, working-class memories with a larger world of art and politics.
Library Journal
W. S. Di Piero is probably the most consistently compelling and idiosyncratic prose writer among contemporary American poets.
Poetry
Like other young intellectuals who came of age during the 1960s, Di Piero returns repeatedly to the bloody crossroads of literature and politics, to what he calls “a passionate interrogation of history and memory.
The Washington Post
W. S. Di Piero is one of the most bracing critical intelligences now at work in our national scene of writing.
The Boston Book Review
