Heartland Errata

A love note, forged in the griefs and joys of family life, to the damaged world and to those who live in poems. Through sonnets and unsonnets, prose poems, and formally inventive lyrics, Di Stefano explores the shifting boundaries between confessional and anticonfessional writing, drawing unity from his experience of suburban fatherhood. The book celebrates a wide constellation of artists, from Ruth Stone and Brigit Pegeen Kelly to John Coltrane, Dolly Parton, and Charles Mingus, while grounding itself in the everyday textures of a life: a child’s drawings, a whale’s song, a 1986 Mets game, an untranslated Montale poem. Together these moments form the broken, capacious, and sincere country of the human heart.