The Widowing Radiance - (VIA Folios) by Dante Di Stefano (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Widowing Radiance is a poem about poetry, querying what it means to live a life in poetry, and praising and interrogating the life and art fountaining through the creative imagination. This book of poetry is also about being a father, a husband, a son, and a man. And it is about the influence of the poet's Italian American Roman Catholic upbringing, from the invocation of his namesake in the prologue to the last canto addressing his children and his children's children.

Review Quotes

I've just now read again the brilliant & passionate address by Dante Di Stefano to Gerard Manley Hopkins, section xx of The Widowing Radiance. In how it finds its way forward, its rhythmic sounds of memory & homage, the discoveries as the poet by way of his "stepped-septasyllabic cinquains" (Emerson's Form aspiring to control or fuse with the pit-bull Power of our best poetry), which concentrate even as they burst, is a wonder to behold. And you, reader, will have your own favorite section(s) of this incendiary (& in so many ways familial) long poem of deep down timeless ("a forever composed of / nows") isness . . .

-William Heyen

I have long known cerebrally that, in Harold Bloom's words, "the meaning of a poem can only be another poem." Now I know viscerally that the meaning of my poetry is The Widowing Radiance. Dante Di Stefano recognizes that, in his own words, "What is real in a poem / is experienced as pulse." He hears the pulse of my poems, and the pulse of his poem is steady, and very real. To read The Widowing Radiance is to feel that pulse, not clinically, finger to wrist, but from within encircling arms: "I embrace my wife, my / children, my dog, & you, dear / reader." The pulse of The Widowing Radiance is strong, and Dante Di Stefano's embrace, dear reader, is warm and secure.

-H. L. Hix

It used to happen, though I never knew exactly how, we'd wind up late at night at parties, in houses we didn't know and with people we hadn't known now having to squeeze by us in the hall on their way to the bathroom or to the kitchen or going home. Reading The Widowing Radiance, I am back, older now, at some party, in a hall built from edgy cinquains and here is a dog on the couch, here is John Wick playing in the background, here is wilding edge of orchard, Democracy spinning loose, and here is extensiveness. Here is Di Stefano singing this is and calling through Zucker, through Howe, through his children, calling through Hopkins, through Hix, through himself to what? To another party, I think, "an elaborate production" fashioned from love, fury, death, disease, a party where someone can "dance in the living room and change."

-Kate Northrop