Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish acclaimed poet and critic W. S. Di Piero’s selected essays, Inside the Box. The title is scheduled for publication in August 2025.
The essays, selected from more than 30 years of celebrated work, invite readers on a captivating journey through literature, art, and the landscape of memory. Blending personal reflections on his Italian-American upbringing with incisive analysis of figures like Dante, Van Gogh, and Coleridge, Di Piero illuminates the complex ways in which life and art intertwine. His lyrical, penetrating prose brings readers along as he confronts intricate questions of identity, creativity, desire, and purpose. Inside the Box presents the record of a life lived in search of, and to honor, meaning.
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.
“W. S. Di Piero is one of the best and most under-recognized writers of our time,” writes Wendy Lesser, author and Founding Editor of The Threepenny Review. “His prose style is powerfully attractive and unique.”
Peter Campion, executive editor at Unbound Edition Press, acquired Inside the Box for the house. He notes: “Di Piero writes from the inside looking out. Every sentence bears the palpable imprint of a true artist. I read these essays as I do Ruskin’s Modern Painters, or Woolf’s The Common Reader, or the letters of John Keats.”
Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at Unbound Edition Press, said, “These selected essays bring Di Piero’s work into fine focus, highlighting ‘the power of language to reveal, enchant, disguise, and transgress.’ Ultimately, Inside the Box presents layered incantations that bring culture back to life and life back to culture. They animate what is truly at stake as interest in and support for the humanities gets reduced, making this volume surprisingly timely.”
