About Dante Di Stefano
Dante Di Stefano is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook, including, most recently, the book-length poem, The Widowing Radiance (Bordighera Press, 2025). His next poetry collection, Heartland Errata, is forthcoming from Etruscan Books in 2026. He co-edited the
anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018) and lives in Endwell, New York with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, their son, Dante Jr., and their goldendoodle, Sunny.
https://www.dantedistefano.com
A Profile of the Author
Notes on the work
This poem meditates on my own childhood (and the idea of childhood) through the lens of the childhood of my two small children. The thumbless man at the beginning of the poem was my grandmother’s cousin, a machinist who had lost his thumbs on the job and who loved Frost (as did my grandmother); hearing these old cousins recite poems they’d learned by heart in high school—Frost, Millay, Sandburg—provided my first intimations of what poetry could be and do in the world and in my life. At that time, we lived next to a funeral home and a creek. Throughout my life, I’ve often lived near cemeteries, train tracks, creeks, and rivers. One of my earliest memories involves waking to birdsong in the house near the funeral home, which for me is another memory presaging how the music of words would keep on awakening me throughout my adulthood.
The “unsonnet” is a kind of poem I’ve been writing for several years. It’s not a form, though it gestures at form. Really, the “unsonnet” is a metapoetic convention of titling meant to foreground the poem as a made-thing (as artifice and artifact) while invoking the radical unmaking capacity of lyric discourse. Roethke said art undoes the damage of haste. For me a poem provides the habitation for such undoing. I hope, in this unsonnet, I might be about the work of unmaking/undoing the patina that obscures the naivete that once allowed me to see the wind as a wagon pulled by sparrows, the unreproducible amber glow of early dawn through the venetian blinds when I was three or four.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
Recently, I discovered the British band, Wet Leg, and I’ve been really loving their new album, moisturizer. I think they’re the best band to come along in a very very very long time. I’ve also been listening to Jeff Tweedy’s new triple album Twilight Override and an album from 2017 called Los Ángeles by the Spanish singer, Rosalía. Marshall Allen’s recently released The Omniverse Oriki has been topping my jazz playlist since September. I’ve also been loving Snow Tha Product’s M.a.M.a. and all the singles released by Jorjiana. In the 90s, my younger brother was a huge D’Angelo fan. D’Angelo’s passing made me revisit Brown Sugar and Voodoo and think about that time in my life around the turn of the millennium.
Last week, I listened to a great audiobook version of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass read by Forest Whitaker. Whitaker’s narration was so poignant and moving and added nuance to a book that I have read and taught many times.
On a weekly basis I enjoy Rolling Stone’s Music Now podcast, hosted by the great music journalist, Brian Hiatt, and What Went Wrong, a well-researched behind-the-scenes look at famous Hollywood flops and blockbusters.
In my house, the favorite song, though, is “The Night Begins to Shine,” a faux-eighties song from the cartoon Teen Titans Go! My four-year-old and seven-year-old highly recommend it. I do too. I love the lyric: “When I look at you / I see the story in your eyes.” I’m writing this on the day after Halloween; they went as Hulk and She-Hulk.
