Douglas Piccinnini has left the dream behind, the dream of a language that communes around yearning, “to go on quitting and find a new door / way to stand in to begin / in the hot ash of beginning...” I love this poetry that is prefaced with desire’s drop-out—starting as if from a farewell to “...today’s graft of / coughed up / meaning on meaning...”—then sprawls into the yawning ellipsis with Nietzsche-an aplomb, where the world is made like “an emptied drum verbs the air.” This is a new origin of things “...made / by what is missing...” This is Beautiful, Safe, & Free.
— Ted Dodson

In Douglas Piccinnini’s Beautiful, Safe & Free we are past the logic of contradiction; the answer is we “prefer neither,” and violence makes irony hold its own hand—then twist it. “You must / be forced to be free.” One thing is clear: someone needs money, so the poet-gambler-hustler gives it their best shot, but the games can never be fun when “[t]oday’s graft of / coughed up / meaning on meaning / goes unnoticed.” By the book’s homecoming, the calamities of “A Western Sky ‘’ manifest as capitulation to the sputtering lung. At last one’s blood is usable, the blow lyrically deepened rather than stunted. “One is saying farewell avant farewell.” But in praying for a path through death, it’s prayer, not death that Piccinnini finds.
— Jenn Soong