DOMESTICA

Domestica, Samuel Piccone’s debut collection, firmly plants its feet at the fraught intersection of inheritance and the escaping of it. Across these interrogative poems, the routines of marriage, parenthood, and faith reside in a place where, “every garden is erased / by the thrum of impermanence.” This collection insists on reckoning with the collage and echo that defines our day-to-day lives. If, “silence is the earth’s way of embracing us / in whatever loneliness we think we deserve,” Piccone seeks whatever answers are held in the deepest parts of that silence. At once aphoristic and vulnerable these poems insists, “the stars are there to ache us into asking whatever we haven’t / brought ourselves to ask.” To keep looking. To be startled into paying attention to the world.

ADVANCED PRAISE

“Samuel Piccone’s debut collection, Domestica, is a field study of the quiet, (extra)ordinary labors that hold a family together. With a voice at once tender and devastatingly funny, Domestica lays bare the grit that is commitment beyond the dress and party: the urgent loneliness of marriage, the metamorphic bewilderment of fatherhood, the ferocious mundanity of love, love that exhausts and endures, love that is all. These poems illuminate the private realm as it is, as it really is, with radiant honesty—to read them is like looking into a house at night with its windows lit up.”
—Leila Chatti, author of Wildness Before Something Sublime

“By ‘praying in the wrong direction,’ Samuel Piccone’s Domestica presents itself as both brutal and tender. Here, the center becomes the outskirt—fatherhood an echo, a marriage an armful of tallboys and feathers, death and prayer, prairie and desert. These are poems of motion and pivot. Through this, Piccone brings us a restless collection of damage and helps us find light by looking toward the dark. I am astonished by the honesty in these poems.”
—Leah Poole Osowski, author of Exceeds Us

“Here is the wise and vulnerable voice I have been searching for. A voice within four walls, who opens the windows of that room to let history and the natural world pour in, so that meaning is made. These are some of the truest and most well-crafted poems I have read in a long time. Here is a book of a generation. Domestica is the example when we say it is not a book but a life.”
—Tyree Daye, author of a little bump in the earth

PUPA

Samuel Piccone’s landscapes inhabit his characters, father and mother, neighbor, friend, wife, and that habitation both haunts and heralds, binds and rends the man he is becoming, unraveled by the transformative power of language, a transparent chrysalis that reveals the wet wings of the churning world. An evocative and moving first collection.--Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

Pupa is an utterly distinctive book, lyrical and lovely in its summoning up the ingenious persistence of insects with their curious beauty "fluttering through nothingness." Entomania, with metaphysical conceits "to keep the earth from falling out of love with you"--John Balaban, author of Path, Crooked Path and Locusts on the Edge of Summer