Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish W. S. Di Piero’s fourteenth collection of poems, Burning Money. The title is scheduled for publication in August 2025.
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.
John Ashbery once called Di Piero’s poems “calm, grave, firm, sensuous and as deeply refreshing as a cup of well water.” Philip Levine wrote that “he has caught our American voices in all their glory and banality, our diction and our inflections, even when we’re talking to ourselves.”
Peter Campion, executive editor at Unbound Edition Press, acquired Burning Money for the house. He writes, “To read W. S. Di Piero is to see your world dipped in a saline solution and given back to you, glimmering with renewed detail: the familiar becomes strange, the strange familiar, and the English language so fine-edged it almost stings. For all its lyrical compression, Burning Money reveals tremendous range. The title poem and ‘Nat Turner’s Dream,’ for example, have genuine political power, minus any rhetorical tub-thumping. Then there’s the erotic charge of ‘Mr. Sandman’ and ‘The Hairbrush,’ as well as the celebration of artwork in ‘Edward Hopper (Yellow and Red)’ and ‘Practice Room.’ Di Piero is simply the maestro.”
Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at Unbound Edition Press, said, “Di Piero’s verse sings in the clearest notes, with pitch-perfect refinement, across the distracting and distracted cacophony of so much contemporary poetry. His poems, reverberant with fearless truths, will echo across generations to come. Our job, our honor, is to amplify them through publication. Wise readers will be well-served and greatly rewarded by doing one thing: simply listen.”
