Antony Di Nardo

This arresting first collection is, in part, a delicately balanced look at Beirut from the perspective of a Westerner who lives and works in that remarkable city. Whether writing about the Middle East or about domestic life, Di Nardo refuses to romanticize; he doesn’t moralize about the causes of perennial conflicts. He is that rare thing: a clea …

Soul on Standby is a hybrid of the surreal and the narrative. It exposes the under-layers, the subtext, of experience in a voice that registers common patterns of speech and startles with the unexpected. Its themes are broad, its stories chiseled out of the quotidian, its miniature worlds surprising and revealing.These poems draw on memory and its …