Douglas Piccinnini has set the mark for new poems of a terrific integrity, unsmiling (their humor is deep down, waiting); poems sharply seeing. Seeing, for instance, that the mathematical universe is maddeningly out of synch with the negative numbers of the daily emotions that cannot catch up with the day: ‘what’s this dumb rope to cling to.’ Where is the sum? The transcendence? ‘All the coin towers / tooth down.’” -Cal Bedient, author of The Multiple