Bawdy, broken, bold, and beautiful, Distilled Spirits: Coffee & Recovery is a chapbook of villanelles portraying characters who paradoxically struggle with addictions while striving for transcendence. Alcoholism and recovery are often obsessive, cyclical, and repetitive; hence, villanelles, literally, "songs of the villagers," express so much of what addicts experience on a daily basis. Like David's Psalms, these dramatic monologues and character portraits give voice to those who are often marginalized, allowing them to speak freely in the vernacular: variously vulgar and virtuous, raw and refined.
Advance Praise for Distilled Spirits: Coffee & Recovery
Robert Piazza's Distilled Spirits: Coffee & Recovery descends into the underworld of addiction and its effects in order to pass through it, to rise again into the light. These poems confront spiritual pain, acknowledge it, own it, so as to get to a place of hope. With a surefooted attention to form, Piazza never lets these poems settle for being shocking. With a clear, keen- edged voice, these poems deliver us to deepened empathy and a recognition that the struggles are all real. Whatever we think we ask for, Distilled Spirits: Coffee & Recovery gives us what we need.
-Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Loneliness and Let's Not Call It Consequence
Distilled Spirits: Coffee & Recovery, Robert Piazza's compelling new chapbook comprised of forty-five - go ahead and count 'em - forty-five villanelles, exists as a funhouse-mirror-cross between the dramatic monologues of Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tilbury Town (or his own lesser-known villanelle "The House on the Hill") and the familiar villanelles we have admired for years: Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." But Piazza's speakers aren't professional poets by any means - his characters work their addictions to pornography, alcohol, sex, drugs, and even religious striving like flaming, perpetual hangnails. I thought I'd get bored reading the same poetic form again and again, but I was dead wrong. This is a terrific series, full of inventive variations, that mixes solid craft with surprising invention. Don't miss it.
-William B. Patrick, author of Saving Troy: A Year with Firefighters and Paramedics in a Battered City
Robert Piazza's Distilled Spirits: Coffee & Recovery allows people like me to see into the world of addiction and feel the pain that others experience while in the throes of addiction to sex, pornography, alcohol, and drugs. Piazza is amazing with his detail to the villanelle form in these forty-five incredible poems reaching deep with his voice and diction to express what addiction looks and feels like. Piazza is a master of poetry.
-Susan M. Davis, author of Where There is Breath, There is Hope and Lipstick Lesbian
Rob Piazza is an American poet and classical guitarist who earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Fairfield University and his BA in music from Boston College. His repertoire includes music by Sor, Tárrega, and Brouwer, and his poems have appeared in Welter Online at UBalt, Helix Literary Magazine at CCSU, and Long River Review at UCONN. His full-length manuscript "Another Revolution" was selected as a finalist for the 2025 Fairfield Book Prize. Currently, he serves as Poet Laureate of Litchfield, Connecticut. https: //www.pw.org/directory/writers/robert_piazza
