There’s a lush urgency to Dante Di Stefano’s poems, as they “construct a grateful life,” while paying witness to the dark forces which move against us. In this book’s brilliant title poem, Di Stefano braids together physical, emotional, societal, and literary associations to create a powerful sense of dislocation and location, of American isolation and malaise. Yet throughout this dazzling collection, the poet balances his laments of an impending “song of extinction”—both personal and environmental—with moving and tender celebrations of life’s splendor and diversity. Di Stefano’s cry that “I am a zygote/ in a pinwheel galaxy of grief,” captures Heartland Errata’s central theme and creed: the seed for an exuberant life exists amid our despair and suffering.
A master craftsman, Di Stefano’s voice moves easily from prose poem to lyrical stanzas that spill in jazz riffs onto the page with a waterfall’s fluidity and energy. Apprehending the world as a maximalist, his poems create matrices of ideas, images, and feelings interconnecting the beautiful complexities of our hieroglyphic world. Possessed of great verbal finesse, Di Stefano imbues even punctuation marks with philosophical meanings, as when his repetitive use of curving and sliding ampersands suggests the continuity of all things or the open-ended nature of being. When he captures the mystery of voltas, they turn and spin his poems into vortexes of connection and wonder. And his frequent echoing of “yes,” throughout the book serves as a defiant affirmation of hope. Although a vibrant heir to Whitman, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Ashbery, Dante Di Stefano’s voice is unlike anyone else’s in contemporary poetry, as he “reinvent[s] the awe in the throatsong of the word,” revealing a profound love and reverence for the world’s invisible and startling gifts.
~Maurya Simon, author of The Blue Bridge
praise for
Heartland Errata
Reading Heartland Errata is like slipping into the music of an afternoon reverie, surrounded by open books of poetry, philosophy, tomes of science, history, and museum masterpieces—all these great works murmuring at once, and the singular, deeply human voice of Dante di Stefano asking how we might “matter ourselves” into this world. In this collection, dream logic is the only grammar left, and Di Stefano’s poems resist the final period, shining instead “snugly in the ampersand… an em dash: / a last ellipsis,” writing into art, memory, and inheritance as a way to keep going. Creation itself becomes a form of motion—each poem a return, a revision, a renewed beginning. And still—because a tenderness hums beneath this unmoored, time-fractured America—Di Stefano’s poems remain open, alive in the sentence after the sentence, unwilling to arrive at an end. ~Alexandra Lytton Regalado
Through a series of self-portraits, elegies, and “unsonnets,” Dante Di Stefano writes a long love-letter to poetry itself, borrowing and remixing the modern canon along the way—putting Simic, Bukowski, and Borges in conversation with pop music, climate change, and the steady drip of our daily newsfeeds. Armed with a fiercely open heart, he explores the messiness of middle America with an erudition that's never smug, and tenderness that's never tame. It is possible to make a lyric life out of interruptions, anxieties, and the stubborn conviction that a single line can matter. Read Heartland Errata for proof. ~Timothy Green
What a bracing, thrilling collection of poems. Just scan the Table of Contents and you’ll be in! Dante Di Stefano breaks the mold for the lyric poem, the forms it can take, the depths it can reach. He writes an “unsonnet” to his fellow high school teachers, beside a nocturne for a sleeping child; after she has won the Nobel Prize, he writes a brilliant letter-poem to Louise Glück, about reading and not reading her work; a riff on a Coltrane album becomes a love poem to a brother; the night prayer of a child radio-blurs into holy communion for Mets players circa 1986. And in the title poem, Di Stefano offers poetry itself as correction for our misreadings of America and ourselves. These are poems that help me navigate my own heartland’s errata, to find in my errors my way. ~Murray Silverstein