I’m pleased to announce I’ll be reading with Dora Malech, John Murillo, Will Schutt and Nicole Sealey at Otherwise/Altroquando Bookshop on January 2, 2020. If you’re in or near Rome for the New Year, swing on by and say hi, have a beer and hear some def poetry.

Saturday, Dec. 7 I’m doing a book launch for Unburial at the Anglo American Book in Rome – with Moira Egan! If you’re in the area, come on by and say hello.

Anglo American Book – Via della Vite 102 (Piazza di Spagna) – 6pm

Come hear poetry by American poets Marc Alan Di Martino & Moira Egan read from their recent books Unburial (Kelsay Books) and Synaesthesium (New Criterion Prize) at the historic Anglo American Book (Est.1953) near the Spanish Steps in Rome, Italy.

Marc Alan Di Martino is a Pushcart-nominated poet and author of the collection Unburial (Kelsay Books, 2019). His work appears in Rattle, Rivet Journal, Baltimore Review, Palette Poetry and many other journals, as well as the anthologies Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife (Kingly Street Press, 2019) and What Remains: The Many Ways We Say Goodbye (Gelles-Cole, 2019). He lives in Perugia, Italy.

Moira Egan’s most recent collections are Synæsthesium (The New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2017) and Olfactorium (Italic Pequod, 2018). Her poems, prose, and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies on four continents. She teaches Creative Writing at St. Stephen’s School in Rome.

I’d almost forgotten – well, not really, I just have little time – to mention the anthology Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take up the Knife, which came out in October, on almost the same day as UNBURIAL.  The anthology is edited by Betsy Mars, and is a collection of original poems inspired by an offhand line of mine, “Knives cut both bread and throats.” Betsy and I were chatting about social media, its virtues and its drawbacks, and I fired off a line she liked.  We exchanged poems beginning with the line, and Betsy liked the idea of an anthology so much she even started her own publishing imprint, Kingly Street Press, to make it happen.

Here is my contribution to the anthology:

Duality

Knives cut both bread and throats
tongues and fruit, a length of rope
to fashion both knot and noose.
A blade can scissor hope,
whittle back bone, crack
skull, scrape out the pulp
from teeth then sign its name
in flesh soft as an apricot.
It is a weapon, and is not.

(There are twenty-three other poems in the book!)