A N T H O N Y D I P I E T R O
kiss & release
You may assume “this is a failed romantic gesture” or else “the best thing that happened to sex/since the devil invented it.”
If a poetry book could sleep around, get divorced, and fall in love with a hookup, that book would be kiss & release.
If a book could kill a snake to revive a dead lover, this one would. This book parties, hollers (and whispers) at hotties, and craves escape: “I will invent a way.”
If you’ve ever been bored during group sex, this book’s for you.
Do not read while driving: the book’s already driving too fast, singing loudly, and using Siri to reply to fuckboys.
Anthony DiPietro
About Anthony
Anthony DiPietro is a gay sex poet and arts administrator originally from Providence, Rhode Island. He has lived throughout New England and in California, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, he also earned a creative writing MFA at Stony Brook University. Now deputy director of Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, he resides in Worcester, MA. He composed his 2021 chapbook And Walk Through (Seven Kitchens Press) on a typewriter during the pandemic lockdowns. kiss & release is his debut collection. His writing and readings are featured on his website, www.AnthonyWriter.com.
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Anthony has developed this resource for fellow writers: How to submit and publish your work.
Recent Writing
Published Online
Recent Interviews & Poems
Loving All These Men. Is That What I Think - West Trade Review
Lyric Essentials Interview on Diane Seuss
Two poems appeared in Typehouse Literary Magazine
Two Collaborations with Apple iPhone - Summerset Review
SPIT, POET! Interview - Motif Magazine
Contributor Interview - Rappahannock Review
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2020 Poems
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Recipe appeared in The 2020 Gallery: Marking Time from The Public's Radio.
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Arkana awarded Editor's Choice to Resurrection Spell, and you can hear me read it on the site.
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Prose poem When I was an uber driver, appears at Puerto del Sol.
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Stirring Lit features A Letter to My Therapist While I Am High, a mashup with James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room.
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Three poems on the pandemic were published in a special issue of GUESTHOUSE: Ante Meridiem, Cul-de-sac, and Night Owl.
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Love Is Finished Again is featured in Breakwater Review.
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Driving Across the Texas Panhandle, the Sky Blushed appears on The Broadkill Review.
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Storm Cellar Quarterly awarded Possession Diary second place in its annual Force Majeure flash contest (see pg.4).
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Broken City Magazine features Delirium with Lines from Rebecca (pg.7).
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2019 Writing
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A Guide to Living with It (essay)
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On Rappahannock Review, read Mornings Are Mostly Made of Habits
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In Jet Fuel Review: city boy hears crickets as advancing army sirens
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Pretty Owl Poetry features If What Physicists Now Admit (p.34)
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Two poems, Self-Talk in End Times and A few years ago, I got a ticket for being exposed... are part of Issue 19 of Monday Night.
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Love Is a Temple Love the Higher Law is in Washington Square Review.
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While Your Husband Is Drinking in Dallas appears in Cider Press Review.
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Archive of Poems Online
2017-2018
No Pet Names Because You Know Who You Are
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The Night I Asked You to Break My Heart and Sex Tour of Vermont
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A Winter Descends in the Middle of Your Sixteenth Summer
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Kiss in Rittenhouse Square and Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Affair
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Self Portrait with Wind in My Hair (see p. 31)
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Make Love to Me and Only to Me in the Dark
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There Will Be No Other End of the World
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The Heart Has No Limit, Says a Friend Trying to Comfort Me
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Those Two Spiders Died Loving Each Other
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A Gen Xer and a Millennial Speak About the End of the World.
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This Poem Should Be Neither Seen Nor Heard
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Some things happened so long ago, it's hard to tell
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"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."
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"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
Oscar Wilde
Watch and Listen
Guts Publishing hosted a reading for the anniversary of its anthology Stories About Penises. Anthony's reading of The Violinist at the Pulitzer Reading and Colossus Endowed lasts from about 43:00-49:00.
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Anthony read in May 2020 with his Stony Brook University graduate school cohort.
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Here Anthony reads with members of a Prose Poetry class I taught in April 2020.
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Anthony also read at the virtual launch of The Southampton Review in May 2020 (4th reader).
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For audio-only recordings of published poems not available to read online, visit this SoundCloud page. Titles include Resurrection Spell, The Violinist at the Pulitzer Reading, Who Do You Think You Are?, A Garden Missing from It, hi nrg edm + me, The Invention of Sex, What Possessed Them to Create Me?, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Affair.
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Reading at One Kings Lane in December 2018: Self-Talk in End Times.
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Reading at a National Poetry Month 2018 reading on video here. (I introduce the event, then read at 16:30 and 37:00.)
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Video: reading This Poem Should Be Neither Seen Nor Heard at Poetry Street, a monthly community event, September 2017.
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Reading at a National Poetry Month 2017 celebration at Stony Brook Southampton Library. You can see and hear the reading here.
