Heartland Errata - by Dante Di Stefano (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A love note, forged in the griefs and joys of family life, to the damaged world and to those who live in poems.

Through sonnets and unsonnets, prose poems, and formally inventive lyrics, Di Stefano explores the shifting boundaries between confessional and anticonfessional writing, drawing unity from his experience of suburban fatherhood. The book celebrates a wide constellation of artists, from Ruth Stone and Brigit Pegeen Kelly to John Coltrane, Dolly Parton, and Charles Mingus, while grounding itself in the everyday textures of a life: a child's drawings, a whale's song, a 1986 Mets game, an untranslated Montale poem.

Together these moments form the broken, capacious, and sincere country of the human heart.

Review Quotes

"Dante Di Stefano breaks the mold for the lyric poem, the forms it can take, the depths it can reach."

--Murray Silverstein, author of Any Old Wolf

"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."

--Alexandra Lytton Regalado, author of Relinquenda