Poetry Collections

STONES ARE THE FIRST TO RISE

2025, Dos Madres Press

In Stones Are the First to Rise, Buddha, a U.P.S. driver, and an old woman living in hill country shares space and time with stones and peas and war and climate change, plus explorations of childhood and becoming a particular person. Throughout many of his books, Giannini finds himself working with discrete sets of concerns over the course of months or years, concerns that nevertheless cohere as a single envisioning, a book, as the parts of the body cohere to make body. Antonio Porchia’s well-known words are appropriate here: “I know what I have given you. I don’t know what you have received.” The book is now in your hands.

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ALREADY LONG AGO

2023, Dos Madres Press

The poems in this book are selected from a year’s worth of work in writing lyric and narrative poems, songs, prosepoems, hybrid haibun, short and long-lined haiku.

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THE DAWN OF NOTHING IMPORTANT

2022, Dos Madres Press

Each of the eight sections of David Giannini’s The Dawn of Nothing Important contains mostly short poems and prosepoems embodying aspects of Time and Duration anchored in the physical, and most often the natural, world.

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MAYHAP

2019, Dos Madres Press

Some of the ancient poets came to believe life is poetry, and therefore daily, moment with moment, notes of birds and notes becoming poems. Cid Corman, with whom I corresponded for decades, often said, “Catch the poem as it is occurring.” In that spirit, I offer the brief, fugitive pieces in this book as more or less an anthology with one author. —David Giannini

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IN A MOMENT WE MAY BE STRANGELY BLENDED

2019, Dos Madres Press

David Giannini’s formal, elegant and circuitous patterns of thought, the immediacy of his observations, approach full disclosure. Every word counts for something more than itself, like a leaf is more than a leaf, or a flower a flower. He turns each line deftly like a dancer following his shadow on the road to indeterminacy, not knowing where or when it will end.  

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THE FUTURE ONLY RATTLES WHEN YOU PICK IT UP

2018, Dos Madres Press

No one’s voice or thought is like David Giannini’s. Witty, wise and wonderful, some of these poems are downright hilarious.  I won’t say which, because it’s more fun if you discover them for yourselves.  Every once in a while, though, he looks out at us from the page and tells us a bold truth straight on, without humor but with infinite understanding of himself and his place in the world.  

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FACES SOMEWHERE WILD

2017, Dos Madres Press

David Giannini’s Faces Somewhere Wild spans his 45 years in the Berkshire hill-towns of Massachusetts. … Giannini is the poet-hunter, who identifies himself as prey, in search of what waits at the threshold of expression: It wants to grab you by the throat. You don’t turn away; /instead, you unbutton your shirt.  

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POROUS BORDERS

2017, Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

In these vertical prose poems, Porous (more Stevens’s Crispin than Berryman’s Henry) takes us through condensed narratives to grand myth and philosophy. Correspondence here leads to contradiction: “each is a shutter of the other.” And along the way devilish angels offer “another place, also of poetry, a place of lyric dissociation, a locus” on the page—these “micro-monoliths” swirl with macro-spin. – Dennis Barone  

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SPAN OF THREAD

2015, Červená Barva Press

Many of these poems, though short, resonate deeply, and few poets get so much from so few words. These two books complement each other through Giannini’s great skill with language and his ability to join the concrete and the abstract. It’s poetry grounded in the earth.  

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RIM/WAVE

2012, Quale Press

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