W. S. Di Piero was born in South Philadelphia in 1945. He is the author of eight previous books of poetry, as well as three volumes of translation from the Italian. He writes about art for the San Diego Reader and has published three collections of essays and criticism on art, literature, and personal experience. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Lila Wallace?Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He lives in San Francisco.

Now in paperback: the "lovely and evocative book” (San Francisco Chronicle) of poems both new and old that celebrates a quarter century of passionate engagement with real life and its transformation into poetic form: the pull of faith and the poet's suspicion of transcendence, urban worlds and the mysterious jazz of street language, desire and sexual need, love and loss.