Skirts and Slacks by W. S. Di Piero

Philip Levine recommends
Skirts and Slacks, poems by W. S. Di Piero: "In his new book, the poet W. S. Di Piero manages to place the reader in specific places at particular times with such ease and authority that after a single reading I felt close to lives I'd known nothing about and cared nothing about until he introduced me to them. His poems have the texture of American cities, the sights, sounds, and especially the smells of where we've lived in the last thirty years, and he has caught our American voices in all their glory and banality, our diction and our inflections, even when we're talking to ourselves. By some magic-let's call it inspiration-he knows us even when there's almost nothing to know." (Knopf)