Rattle of the Sun

A magnification of plants, people, and places, Gregg Orifici's Rattle of the Sun is a meditation on the personal and the monumental. His poems are moving, carefully crafted portraits of longing, discovery and rambunctious joy. They surprise with unequivocal details that stab at the heart of understanding, giving voice to misunderstood invasive weeds, the exuberant elderly, the boy coming to terms with being gay, and the plight of the gardener who, to create beauty, must play God. This collection's disarming charm invites the reader to see the power and playful visions within the prosaic.

Rattle of the Sun marks out the arc of a life whose worldly range is astonishingly wide-everything from the Camino de Santiago and the fall of the Berlin Wall to Farah Fawcett, a Sicilian palazzo and hilltown Vermont. But Orifici's spiritual journey is what's really at stake here, the stops along that road rendered in intense, abundant detail. Sweet, cosmopolitan, satiric, wise, wry, soulful, self-doubting, impetuous, annoyed, curious, and more: this book has it all!

-David Rivard, author of Standoff, winner of the PEN/New England Prize in poetry

In Rattle of the Sun, Gregg Orifici explores his boyhood and the emotional undertow of pop culture, his home life in New England, his Sicilian roots and other geographies, as well as the homesteading of technological progress and the verdant soul. Plainspoken and expansive, vibrant and chromatic, these poems are born of an impeccable ear and precise pitch; they embody a staggering range of personal experience and historical awareness, trajectories of remembered and present lives. Acute perceptions of ceaseless becoming, of the personhood, teachings, and gifts of plants within the complexity of their and our quantum lives, set all the senses to singing of discovery and loss. They convey what it is to exist on the physical and spiritual edge: "Our own brittle cacophony / we call love."

William O'Daly, author of The New Gods and translator of Pablo Neruda's Book of Twilight