Selected from more than 30 years of W. S. Di Piero's celebrated work, the prose collected in Inside the Box invites readers on a captivating journey through literature, art, and the landscape of memory. Blending intimate reflections on his working-class Italian American upbringing in South Philadelphia with incisive analysis of towering figures like Dante, Van Gogh, Coleridge, and Giacometti, Di Piero illuminates the complex ways in which life and art intertwine — and how they rescue us from despair.
With lyrical, penetrating writing that moves seamlessly between the personal and the universal, Di Piero confronts intricate questions of identity, creativity, desire, and purpose. Whether he's recalling his childhood encounters with neighborhood characters, examining the revolutionary power of photography, or wrestling with the nature of memory itself, his writing pulses with intellectual rigor and emotional honesty. These essays reveal an artist's mind at work: restless, probing, generous in its attention to both high culture and street-corner wisdom.
From meditations on selling Bibles door-to-door as a teenager to profound encounters with masterpieces in European museums, from the gritty realities of manual labor to the transcendent possibilities of poetry, Di Piero maps the territory where experience becomes art. Inside the Box presents the record of a life lived in passionate search of meaning — and stands as testimony to literature's power to transform the raw materials of existence into lasting revelation.
"W. S. Di Piero is one of the best and most under-recognized writers of our time. His prose style is powerfully attractive and unique." — Wendy Lesser, previous praise
"Mallarme said the poet's job is to purify the language of the tribe. W. S. Di Piero does just that, mainly by aligning his rich, working-class memories with a larger world of art and politics." — Library Journal, previous praise, Library Journal https://www.libraryjournal.com
"W. S. Di Piero is probably the most consistently compelling and idiosyncratic prose writer among contemporary American poets." — Poetry, previous praise, Poetry https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-s-di-piero
"Like other young intellectuals who came of age during the 1960s, Di Piero returns repeatedly to the bloody crossroads of literature and politics, to what he calls 'a passionate interrogation of history and memory.'" — The Washington Post, previous praise, The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com
"W. S. Di Piero is one of the most bracing critical intelligences now at work in our national scene of writing." — The Boston Book Review, The Boston Book Review https://www.bostonreview.net
