KISS & RELEASE

Praise for KISS & RELEASE

God, Anthony DiPietro’s poetry is good. I’m supposed to write a blurb, and there’s a formula for that, but I’m sitting here reading, and I’m electric about what I’m reading. Not intrigued in that academic kind of way, though these poems are certainly well-crafted. I’m excited in a way that makes me remember what it was like when I’d find a book as a teenager, something dangerous and contraband, something so much a lifeline, and it would speak to all those hidden parts of me with a rush of sexuality and exposure, a mirror and a flashlight. But I’m not a teenager anymore. I’m a grown man who has somehow survived and touched and loved and screwed, and these poems uncorked the bottle and let all those rowdy spirits out. This book - these poems - these feelings - are why I love poetry, why I need poetry, why poetry saved my life - and why it’s still reminding me how to be alive. Forget the formula. This is me, a reader, praising the poetry gods and angels that this book exists, for me, and for everyone who came before and will come after. 

—Bryan Borland, founding publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press

Anthony DiPietro’s kiss & release is a pleasurable, lovable book about love and pleasure. DiPietro’s approach to these poems, even to poems of grief and heartache, is endlessly playful, darkhearted, lighthearted, and resplendent with anti-heroic wit and sex that charms and stings. The delight of this text does not diminish its formal and literary acumen. There are references to Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Pasolini, Plath, and Marie Howe, all ribboned-through with music—pop, classical, hip hop, country—and although DiPietro makes ample use of the prose poem, there is also a sestina, a villanelle, a pop cento, an abecedarian, a sequence, and a poem arrived at via predictive text. I tell you, this collection is a romp and a grand buffet, a paean to the urban masq, the fuckboy, and hot, thriving, fleeting love.

—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

Playlist for KISS & RELEASE

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About ANTHONY DIPIETRO

Anthony DiPietro is a gay poet writing about romance and identity. An arts administrator originally from Providence, RI. He has lived throughout New England and in California, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, he earned a creative writing MFA at Stony Brook University. Now deputy director of Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, he resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. He composed his 2021 chapbook And Walk Through (Seven Kitchens Press) on a typewriter during the pandemic lockdowns. kiss & release (Unsolicited Press, 2024) is his debut collection. (Photo credit: Julie Brigidi)