David Giannini’s Stones are the First to Rise is reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp in Misfit Magazine.
“In the final poem of Stones Are the First to Rise, “Thinking Back Down Inside Me,” David Giannini reflects:
Too many rectangles took over: ideas and ‘facts’
settled in textbooks forced under my eyes like dyed ice-blocks—
‘the drying and freezing process which goes by the name
of education.’ The gaslighting. The taunts.
A green circle found to betray time by living outside of it
is what I wanted, without knowing why. Poetry sighed.
Learning how to grasp something whole
without enumerating its parts: intuition. It has no time.
Coming to grips with the nature of paradox,
I have as many contradictions as the next man.
So Whitmanesque! In so many ancient myths the life of a person is depicted as an exile, a separation from the original whole from which it is separated. Giannini contains multitudes.”
