Ill Angels explores the breakdowns and joys, the rhythms and reveries, the cul-de-sacs and jubilees, of early midlife. In poems that are at once formally assured and daringly inventive, Dante Di Stefano invokes the lives of artists, musicians, and writers he admires as his poems ruminate on love, death, music, language, and notions of national belonging. Fountaining through this book you will find: Louis Armstrong, Gwendolyn Brooks, the Coen Brothers, John Coltrane, Phillip K. Dick, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bob Dylan, Robert Frost, Guns N’ Roses, Hokusai, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kobayashi Issa, Paul Klee, Dolly Parton, Pearl Jam, Prince, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gene Rodenberry, Sonny Rollins, A Tribe Called Quest, Derek Walcott, Phillis Wheatley, William Carlos Williams, the Wu-Tang Clan, Neil Young, Liu Xiabo, and many more. The poems in this volume range from nightlight to midnight moon to hospital hallway and back again. Written with a commitment to the hard-fought duende and earned communion of poetry, Ill Angels aims at delight, wisdom, and the endless sacred consolations available to us though words on a page and in the air.
Table of Contents
1 │Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen
2 │Reading Rilke in Early Autumn
3 │National Poetry Month, 2017
4 │National Anthem with Elegy and Talon
5 │Elegy with Drowned Sailor and Endless Horizon
6 │The Bronx Pyramid
7 │Stump Speech
8 │Kwansaba Suite from the Heaven of My Departed Poets
10│For My Creative Writing Students
11│Words for My Twelfth Grade English Class, After Reading Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the
Bullet” on Inauguration Day 2017
12│Reading a Single Line by Emily Dickinson on the Day My Father Died
13│Exodus
14│Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering
15│Einstein’s Sparrow
17│Solo
19│Fat Tuesday
20│While Listening to Coleman Hawkins’ “Picasso,” I Remember My Mother as a Young Woman
and I Imagine My Wife in Her Old Age
22│The Mayfly’s Complaint to the Holy Family
23│Sometimes When I’m Listening to Thelonious Monk
24│Channeling Sonny Rollins
25│Anthem for Paisley Park
26│Outlaw Country
27│While Listening to Dolly Parton Sing “Lover’s Return,” I Imagine the Girl in You Talking to the
Boy in Me
28│Louisiana Hayride Shivaree
29│While Listening to Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me,” I Imagine Our Marriage a Montage in a
Coen Brothers Film
30│ Brief Instructions for Drawing a Portrait of My Wife after the Most Violent Week in Recent
U.S. History
31│Portrait of My Wife Listening to Nina Simone
32│Portrait of My Wife as a 90s Mixtape
34│Endless Duende
35│Brass Band Epithalamion
36│Channeling Satchmo
37│Love Poem Written While Listening to “Alligator Crawl” Repeatedly and Misremembering
Lines from Kobayashi Issa
38│Epithalamion with References to Philip K. Dick, Paul Klee, and Gene Roddenberry
39│Brief Instructions for Drawing a Self-Portrait While Listening to John Coltrane
40│Dante
42│O Trampling Empire
43│Gerard Manley Hopkins Versus the Wu-Tang
44│Wear Black, Drink Water, Nourish a Fierce Zeal with Locusts and Wild Honey
45│I Am Your High School Love Poem Come Back
46│Reading William Carlos Williams in My Early Twenties
47│Reading William Carlos Williams in My Late Thirties
48│The Porcupine Climbing the Apple Tree
49│Wilding Orchards
50│American Pastoral with Warped Floorboards
51│Verrückt
52│The Greening of Harriet Tubman
53│And Why This Ridiculous Happiness?
54│Elegy for Liu Xiaobo
55│My Goddaughter Chews Happiness
56│Jubilate Pluto
57│Self-Portrait Illuminating the Initial ‘D’
58│Preamble
59│The 45th
60│The Sorrowful Mysteries
61│Words for My Wife, After Reading Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook” on Our Anniversary
62│Curriculum Vitae
63│Reading Gwendolyn Brooks to Tenth Graders
64│Sunny
65│Reading Langston Hughes to Our Unborn Child
66│Explaining A Love Supreme to My Unborn Daughter
67│Words for My Unborn Daughter Written After Removing a Briar Patch from My Front Yard
and Beginning with a Misremembered Line from a David Ignatow Poem
Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the Dialogist. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018).