In the third Tribus by Etruscan Press, we present
work by poets William Heyen, H. L. Hix, and Dante Di Stefano.
Di Stefano’s Lullaby with Incendiary Device
inspired this tribute to three generations. Upon receiving this submission, we
decided that a joining work which has defined Etruscan over the past
twenty years would be the best way to advance the dialogue.
Lullaby is deeply immersed in a soon-to-be-realized
future, in which Di Stefano’s daughter faces an array of 21st
century challenges. Heyen’s poetry has explored world history, from Nature, to
Native Americans, to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, the Iraq Wars, to the
British Royals. His driving, eclectic force is unmatched in contemporary
poetry. Heyen presents another entry into his Holocaust opus, The Nazi
Patrol. H. L. Hix’s work is also inextricably involved with the world, as
seen in a recent collection, American Anger, which explores the
psychology of rage underneath recent political turmoil, and God Bless,
adapted from the speeches of George W. Bush and the tirades of Osama Bin Laden.
Yet, his work also turns inward, creating new forms to join the world and the
inner life. This theme is most prominent in How It Is That We.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of
Ill Angels and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight. He co-edited
the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America.
William Heyen won the Small Press
Book Award for Crazy Horse in Stillness, and was a National Book Award
Finalist for Shoah Train.
H. L. Hix’s recent
books include The Death of H. L. Hix, a translation of The Gospel, and
Demonstrategy.
Di Stefano Dante Di Stefano is the author of Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). Along with María Isabel Álvarez, he co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in English Literature from Binghamton University and is the poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. He teaches high school English in Endicott, NY and lives in upstate New York with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, their son, Dante Jr., and their dog, Sunny. Heyen William Heyen is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at the College at Brockport. He holds a PhD from Ohio University, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from SUNY. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Germany and a Guggenheim Fellow, he has won NEA, American Academy of Arts & Letters, Pushcart, and other prizes. His poetry has been published in hundreds of anthologies, and in magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Southern Review, and The American Poetry Review. He is the author or editor of forty or more books, won the Small Press Book Award for Crazy Horse in Stillness, was a National Book Award Finalist for Shoah Train, and two of his books have been Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selections. His diary-journal, five volumes of which have been published so far (and enough written for ten more), is the most extensive by any poet in our literature. Nature: Selected & New Poems 1970-2020 has just now appeared in hardcover in 2021 to mark his 80th year. Hix H. L. Hix’s recent books include a novel, The Death of H. L. Hix; an edition and translation of The Gospel that threads canonical and noncanonical sources into a single narrative, and does not assign gender to God or Jesus; an edition, with Julie Kane, of selected poems by contemporary Lithuanian poet Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, called Terribly In Love; an essay collection, Demonstrategy; and an anthology of “poets and poetries, talking back,” Counterclaims. He teaches in the Philosophy Department and Creative Writing Program at a university in “one of those square states.”