Domestica, Samuel Piccone’s debut collection, firmly plants its feet at the fraught intersection of inheritance and the escape from it. Across these interrogative poems, the routines of marriage, parenthood, and faith reside in a place where “every garden is erased / by the thrum of impermanence.” If “silence is the earth’s way of embracing us / in whatever loneliness we think we deserve,” Piccone seeks whatever answers are held in the deepest recesses of that silence. At once aphoristic and vulnerable, these poems insist that “the stars are there to ache us into asking whatever we haven’t / brought ourselves to ask.” To startle us into paying attention to the world.

Samuel Piccone is the author of the chapbook Pupa. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Sycamore Review, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, and RHINO. He serves as poetry editor at Raleigh Review and is a lecturer at Iowa State University.