Stuart Dischell's poetry is passionate, darkly comic, heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. Dig Safe reaffirms why he commands high regard among poets and critics and popularity among his readers. Taking as their metaphor the markings that construction workers use to warn of utilities below street level these new poems pierce the body politic as they evoke interconnection and misalliance, movement and inhabitation."

Another set of antidotal lyrics and story-poems from Stuart Dischell
Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of "Backwards Days" are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischell's poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes startling poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of "Backwards Days" are most particularly about the movement of time,...

Good Hope Road is one of those rare books of verse that combine lyricism with the momentum of narrative, a concern for dailiness with a willingness to embrace wildness. Like Joyce's Dubliners, the twelve poems of the opening sequence, -Apartments, - reflect a wide panorama of contemporary urban consciousness. Dischell's subjects are wronged lovers, thwarted citizens, an idealistic veteran, bickering relations--all with their entangled, fractious alliances. In -Household Gods, - the book's second section, Dischell presents dramatic monologues whose scenes are the shore, the city, and the...

There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell's fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns socially outward and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfigure dread with a reluctant wisdom and come alive to the confusions and implications of what it means to be...