To read W. S. Di Piero's Burning Money is to see your world dipped in a saline solution and given back to you, glimmering with renewed detail: the familiar becomes strange, the strange familiar, and the English language so fine-edged it almost stings. John Ashbery once called Di Piero's poems "calm, grave, firm, sensuous and as deeply refreshing as a cup of well water." Philip Levine wrote that "he has caught our American voices in all their glory and banality, our diction and our inflections, even when we're talking to ourselves." For all their lyrical compression, the poems in Burning Money reveal tremendous range. This is the work of a maestro.

W. S. Di Piero is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, essays, art criticism, and translation. He has been the recipient of the Ruth Lilly prize for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest award. He lives in San Francisco.

"Di Piero gives off cascades of words that run like a warm engine, with all parts working together. There might be a mysterious noise or two along the way but don't worry, you'll be back on the road." — Ed Ruscha, previous praise

"Having mastered the art of weaving gold thread from straw, W. S. Di Piero's [work] exults in such commonplace materials as 'the argument of an afternoon' or 'one street's undistinguished gift.' The poetry that results is calm, grave, firm, sensuous and as deeply refreshing as a cup of well water." — John Ashbery, previous praise

"W. S. Di Piero's poems tear the outer layer of skin off the world. Radiant in hurt and matter-of-factness, the world — what's given — jolts into revelation in poems at once homely and cosmic." — Rosanna Warren, previous praise

"W. S. Di Piero's poems have the texture of American cities, the sights, sounds, and especially the smells of where we've lived in the last thirty years, and he has caught our American voices in all their glory and banality, our diction and our inflections, even when we're talking to ourselves. By some magic — let's call it inspiration — he knows us even when there's almost nothing to know." — Philip Levine, previous praise

"R.P. Blackmur once said that great poetry 'adds to the stock of available reality,' and that's certainly true of W. S. Di Piero's work. He wakes up the language, and in doing so wakes up his readers, whose lives are suddenly sharper and larger than they were before. He's a great poet whose work is just beginning to get the wide audience it deserves." — Christian Wiman, from the Ruth Lilly Prize (2012) commendation

"Offering scrupulously observant freeze frames of consciousness, [Di Piero's work] deserves convenient placement by the telephone, television, computer, or radio so as to be ready to retune a static-buzzed mind's reflective potential. With language that's as simple as it is musical, Di Piero sets dazzling moments amid plainsong." — The New York Times Book Review, previous praise, The New York Times Book Review https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/books/poems-around-the-house.html

"W. S. Di Piero's poems insistently display the features of great art. The poems eschew solipsism, aggrandizement, and the consolation of fantasy, to grapple with the gritty reality of the twenty-first-century surround. Di Piero's milieu is firmly urban … things are moving fast with an urgent, yearning-for-more impetus." — The Philadelphia Inquirer, previous praise, The Philadelphia Inquirer https://www.inquirer.com