Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness

Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness contains selections taken from Simone Di Piero's notebooks going back thirty years. His notebooks offer evidence of a poet's inner life and have been for him a kind of mute conversation partner. They testify in an episodic way to one poet's encounters with the world. Di Piero's materials include life's personal day-to-day debris, as well as reflections on the art of poetry, painting, photography, music, the American character, and urban life. Mickey Rourke is a still-in-progress excavation of the contents of consciousness. "W. S. Di Piero is probably the most consistently compelling and idiosyncratic prose writer among contemporary American poets." --Poetry