Burning Money Book

To read W. S. Di Piero's Burning Money 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. 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." For all their lyrical compression, the poems in Burning Money reveal tremendous range. This is the work of a maestro.