A Carpenter’s Building, Homes For His Poems by Glenn D’Alessio

Whether reshaping how we think about the inner workings of a house with Buck Rogers and Little Orphan Annie, or taking us back to memories of his shop teacher, Glenn D’Alessio carves out layers of hidden truths in A Carpenter’s Building, Homes for his Poems.  He does so with a balanced mix of emotions throughout the chapbook, with poems such as “Toy Soldiers,” which vibrates with an unexpected humor, developing a friction between war and loose, chased, perhaps never caught nails.  It’s as if we are getting a look at the core of his soul as he splits apart each poem, exposing the beautiful and rough knots that make his words relate-able to all.

–Kristina England, author of Stanley Stanley’s Investigative Services and Other Mysteries

Glenn D’Alessio’s strong, precise, subtle poems exhibit the art of carpentry in more ways than one.  With deft turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes reminiscent of Kay Ryan’s elegantly compact meditations, D’Alessio explores not only elements of carpentry—the wooden planks, the tools, the rhythmic movement of log-splitting, planing, or sanding, the separate parts of a house—but also the poignancy of touching other human beings through the structures they inhabit, as when a speaker loosens a bolt tightened twenty-two years earlier by his one-armed uncle: “I feel my uncle’s/ dead strength stored for so long/ give way, as if he has something to say.”  D’Alessio’s poems carefully measure the vast architecture of experience, from the stories hidden in old linoleum or in a box of one-inch nails to the importance of noticing “how many years of a tree/ we were using,” and how boards of red oak being planed sound “deep and slow/ the wider they are.”  These are poems to read, both silently and out loud, and learn from.

–Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, author of Hand Me Down