Join Us June 29 for KISS & RELEASE with Anthony DiPietro
June’s Small Press Big Mouth pick is KISS & RELEASE by Anthony DiPietro, and this one has a pulse. Our Big Mouth Small Press Book Club salon will take place on June 29, 2026 at 5:30 PM Pacific / 8:30 PM Eastern. The replay will be posted afterward for members.
KISS & RELEASE is a queer poetry collection that moves through nightlife, romance, hookups, humor, heartbreak, formal play, masculinity, and the loop of love ending again. It is a party, yes, but not the kind of party where everyone gets out clean. Under the music, there is ache. Under the flirtation, there is grief. Under the joke, there is a speaker asking what intimacy costs when desire keeps wearing the same mask.
The book has been described as “a meditation in a rush,” which is one of those phrases that earns its keep. These poems do move quickly. They disco, rave, swing, confess, panic, brag, seduce, and double back. But the speed is not decorative. It is part of the emotional machinery. The rush is how the book thinks.
At the center of the collection is “Love Is Finished Again,” a seven-part cycle that asks why love keeps ending in ways we recognize. Why do we return to the same rooms, the same lovers, the same scripts, the same disappointments? What actually changes after enough repetition? Does anything change before something starts to decay?
That question of decay runs through the book: ruins, broken language, deteriorating communication, desire that repeats until it becomes both ritual and warning. In KISS & RELEASE, language is never just language. Words flirt. Words protect. Words cast spells. Words fail. Words make intimacy possible, and then sometimes they wreck it.
This is also a book deeply interested in masculinity: its performances, its myths, its devils, its tenderness, its damage, its theater. DiPietro lets masculinity swagger, but he does not let it off the hook. The poems are funny, horny, sharp, and vulnerable, often all in the same breath.
For the salon, we’ll talk with Anthony about voice, form, desire, nightlife, repetition, humor, and the emotional architecture of the book. We’ll also dig into the formal variety of the collection, including prose poems, inherited forms, sequences, pop references, mashups, collaborations, and experiments with language.
A few things to watch for as you read:
love ending “again”
language as spell and wreckage
humor as flirtation, armor, and blade
tenderness under bravado
nightlife as rhythm, setting, and emotional pressure
masculinity under the disco ball and under the knife
the difference between pleasure and escape
You do not need to have a perfect take to join us. You do not need to be a poetry scholar. Bring a favorite line. Bring a question. Bring a moment that made you laugh, blush, argue, or wince. Bring the part of the book that stayed with you after the page turned.
Come for the nightlife. Stay for the wreckage.
