Dante Di Stefano's first book is absolute proof that poetry rises from the ruins. He sings of Binghamton, New York, and the hardscrabble streets where he grew up. He sings the praises of dumpster sparrows and anonymous saints most of us never see. He sings of his father, a postal worker for more than thirty years who died of cancer, the intimate objects and aching absences he left behind. Yet, if the poet confronts death bravely—even speaking in the voice of an unrepentant drone pilot—he also embraces life, the miracles of the everyday. There is music everywhere, from Nina Simone to Muddy Waters to Professor Longhair. There is the childhood friend who insisted, convincingly, that the baby Jesus lived in his washing machine. As the title tells us, love motivates the poems of Dante Di Stefano; love drives them to the page in the middle of the night; love will keep you turning the pages. -Martín Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Zapata's Disciple

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