Birth of Eros
(a novel: Kernpunkt Press)
“Debra Di Blasi’s novel Birth of Eros is unsettling, exciting, and brilliant from its first page to its last.”
–David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
“Di Blasi uses language tempered with a rollicking rhythm that propels the narrative forward but also pulls it up short when it’s the right thing to do. There are no wrong steps in this novel, no wrong words, no wrong twists or turns.... a tight little fist of a book, gut-punching the American Dream.”
–Patrick Parks, The Millions
“Di Blasi’s gift for lyrical prose ranks her among our most nimble wordsmiths, an author whose voice sings in a thousand different tunes—and yet remains distinctly recognizable...searing imagination and red-hot literary courage.”
–Jacob M. Appel, Exacting Clam
"I love it. Poetical. Powerful....funny, irreverent, raw, erotic, intense…. It blew me away, not only as a writer but as a reader…. Buy it. Seek it out.... I highly recommend you read this book."
-Zak Ferguson, Articulate Warbling video reviews
“Combining pinhole focus with a deftly bounding poetic style that I am honestly hard-pressed to compare to much of anyone, Di Blasi flies loop-de-loops of language across every page, stringing together alliterations and portmanteaus and synecdoches and onomatopoeias with a rhythmic, run-on zeal that made me want to hire a jazz drummer to improvise behind my BarcaLounger, quietly brushing snares and hi-hats while I read. This is a little book full to the brim with big ideas, and big feeling.”
–Dave Fitzgerald, Heavy Feather Review
"Birth of Eros is a unique examination of an American period of emerging values and the scum under the surface. Di Blasi’s narrative presents a fantastically memorable voice and story about how people were forced to change at the midpoint of the 20th century and what they had to gain and lose to survive."
–Alex Carrigan, The Temz Review
"At times beautiful, at times brutal, the real protagonist of Birth of Eros is language, the sexiest of unreliable narrators. In Debra Di Blasi’s wicked and wonderful imagination, a novel is a thing that erupts. Starting with a literal birth and moving through family toward sex and yes, the falling of love and death, this experimental prose collection reads like a magician’s coat: we see her staged, pulling blood and scarves and golden light and snow from sleeves that reach to embrace, catch, or maybe shove something that should be flying off a cliff. The act of reading this book is inextricable from erotic tension, mesmerizing."
–Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and With Animal
“Debra Di Blasi’s Birth of Eros, a voice-driven jewel box of tight, honed, sculpted sentences carrying the frequencies of Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, Kathy Acker, and Kathryn Davis, pulsates with emphatic philosophical inquiry and emotional verve across time and cultures. Through her exquisite blend of the brutal and the beautiful, Di Blasi deftly finds the historical bruise incurred by the gordian knot of sex and violence and pushes that bruise until the current moment seems unable to endure. But then, like magic, we return from the slime to endure evermore.”
–Christopher Higgs, author of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney
“In wildly inventive, propulsive prose, Debra Di Blasi’s The Birth of Eros takes us on a clear-eyed romp through the social and psychic underbelly of fifties America. Narrated by a preternaturally wise and linguistically virtuosic baby, this daughter’s wry but tender account of her parents’ thwarted dreams and outsized passion is at once a tale of ruthless exploitation and a rollicking ode to bodies and desire. I read it in one gasp.”
–Janet Sarbanes, author of The Protester Has Been Released and
Letters on the Autonomy Project
Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past (memoir: C & R Press)
• WINNER OF THE 2019 Nonfiction Award C&R Press
• Selected for "Best Nonfiction Books of 2020-2021" by Entropy Magazine
"Selling the Farm is a work of rare sophistication, a source of beauty amid calamity." – Charles Holdefer, Full-Stop magazine
"Rhythmic and lyrical language is the medium through which Di Blasi uncovers the emotional cores of the seasons. The memoir blends poetry and prose in a way that makes you want to mark every line to revisit and unpack later.
Some lines are feasts of images, drawn so clearly and layered so tightly that one clause reveals as much as an entire vignette" –Ariel M. Goldenthal, Hippocampus Magazine
"Selling the Farm, winner of C&R Press Nonfiction Award, defies traditional notions of genre.... This quiet experiment is emboldened by context because as a long-standing member of the small-press world, Di Blasi, an award-winning author of eight books, is like many successful small-press literary figures, especially women: celebrated yet largely unknown. Her choice to make the landscape the protagonist of her memoir is ironic, courageous, and bittersweet because it allows the artist to recede into her art." – Aimee Parkison, Heavy Feather Review
"Marrying prose and poetry, Selling the Farm is the kind of book you want to read with a pen on your lap, to mark its slippery metaphors and juxtapositions.... It speaks to Di Blasi’s skills as a writer that she’s able to turn this ordinary event—stomping through fresh snow—into a transcendent statement on time’s impermanence. – Sarah Curtis, Brevity
“Debra Di Blasi’s extended lyric essay Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past is at once a sustained consideration of the strange and felt world of children, a meditation on time and ‘memory’s echo,’ and a profoundly moving elegy for a lost sister... Above all else, Selling the Farm is an exploration of the placeness of childhood, which Di Blasi brings into focus with astonishing precision, intelligence, and complexity.”
—Wayne Miller, author of Post- and winner of the 2017 Rilke Prize
“Through dynamic layering of sound and syntax, lyric juxtaposition of scene, and agile engagement with the landscape of the page, Di Blasi captures the strange and unstable way that memory works and follows Walter Benjamin’s cue that a book should ‘either dissolve a genre or invent one.’ Owing much to Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, an activist sensibility, and a rollicking disruption and reanimation of memoir’s fundamentals, Selling the Farm—with its snapshots of fallow fields and water’s muddy haste and roar, flashes of childhood ghosts, lineages of grief, populations of sparrows, and meanwhiles of bee colony collapse—is an uprooted biography of place in the tempered un-space of time, a book through which the am-I-there of memory breaks open and reimagines the very genre of memoir.”
–EJ Colen, author of What Weaponry and The Green Condition
“God assigned Adam to name what he saw around him. For all we know, it may have been Eve, the first scientist, who took it on. In Selling the Farm Debra Di Blasi continues the tradition, gifting us a stirring and richly visual tapestry and language of Nature... With spare and minute details, Di Blasi manages to convey the full spectrum of feelings that color our relationship with family, and hers with Nature.”
—Tsipi Keller, author of Nadja on Nadja and The Prophet of Tenth Street
Today Is the Day That Will Matter:
An Oral History of the New America: #AlternativeFictions (Flash Fiction: Black Scat Books)
"As far afield as Di Blasi’s fictions depart from apparent verisimilitude, they nevertheless present versions of that which is familiar—the overheard, the already-told. As such, Di Blasi’s book serves as an important reminder that all social and political orders cohere around fabulist acknowledgments, equally cautionary and spectacular, of how little we really know about that of which we stump and jabber." – Joe Milazzo, The Brooklyn Rail: In Conversation
"This far-ranging collection is smart, tart, provocative, and refreshingly uninterested in making nice. A capacious imagination at work in Today Is the Day That Will Matter asserts, with tenacity, the power of language to make and remake the world." – The Collagist
“Will the world end with a whimper or a bang?” Debra Di Blasi’s TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER gives us a compelling third option: It will end in a whir of pronouncements, gossip, apologies, braggadocio, and the rest of the nonstop human noise we call culture. In 138 very short fictions ranging from the TV show “Chopped” to a pig farm, a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room and the fantasies of a college professor, Di Blasi’s compressed prose and linguistic play result in a jack-in-the-box kind of release found in good poetry. This is a writer in full control of language, from regional idiom to scientific jargon.... Despite our desire to escape the metaphysical and environmental catastrophes we’ve long wrought by now flirting with the concept of a human-robot future, Di Blasi reminds us elegantly and ferociously exactly where our human actions have placed us.
– Leslie McGrath , author of Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives
“Readers beware: This hilarious and moving book is not a safe space. Di Blasi’s TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER: An Oral History of the New America: #AlternativeFictions is a fierce and real-time live-stream pastiche that inhabits voices and points-of-view of our new “American” multitude. Terrifyingly sincere and aching with loss one moment, angry, cruel, even bigoted the next, Di Blasi’s anti-Whitmanian universe expands and collapses into every imaginable corner of what our world has become, to salvage true moments out of this white noise at the penetralia of our virtual hornet’s nest, in which bodies have somehow come alive, “crawled right out of the trashbin of history into the light of public office.” How it smokes and hums with danger!”
– Sam Witt, author of Little Domesday Clock
The Jiri Chronicles& Other Fictions
(short stories: FC2/University of Alabama Press)
"Debra Di Blasi writes in a gray zone where literature, art and conceptual performance meet. Her prose reads like poetry or comes with scrapbook visuals. Her social comment channels Duchamp and his surreal cousins.... – The Kansas City Star
"There are dozens of 'why not?' moments in Jirí, and Di Blasi exploits them all for maximum effect." – Paul Constant for The Stranger
"Di Blasi has a mind unlike anyone else writing fiction today, and this is her finest work yet." – Kevin Prufer, poet, essayist and editor
"By far the most interesting thing she's done.... It's a huge step for Di Blasi, and a welcome one. – Review of Contemporary Fiction
Prayers of an Accidental Nature
(short stories: Coffee House Press)
“In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love’s multiple ironies.” – New York Times Book Review
“Di Blasi’s themes of sexual obsession, physical beauty, and lost love ignite this notable effort to define the perils of intimacy.” – Publishers Weekly
“Debra Di Blasi writes about sex and love with thrilling originality and insight. Prayers of an Accidental Nature is a remarkable collection.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist
“Debra Di Blasi knows the yearnings of the human heart, the pulse that beats beneath our most private and precious deceits, and she will stop at nothing to remind us of our primal leanings toward love.” —Lee Martin, author
Drought & Say What You Like
(novellas: New Directions)
Winner of the Thorpe Menn Book Award
"[Di Blasi's] minimalist style, in Drought & Say What You Like, is brilliantly detailed, like the eye of a camera looking outward at carefully chosen elements of the landscape that make an impression of the whole." – Voices in Italian Americana
"Di Blasi is a bold talent and succeeds in a teasingly abrupt style." – BookLovers
"What's interesting about Drought is how it sustains the tension between the generic elements of tragedy and its precise manifestation in the mundane details of everyday life." – The Review of Contemporary Fiction
"What I love about Di Blasi's Drought is that sense of compression, not only in the language, but in the place itself." – Randall Brown, for Flash Fiction
"A stunning piece of writing... spare and lean, sexy, psychologically charged and extremely visual.... A compelling journey into [Di Blasi's] own heart of darkness." – Neon, Nevada Council for the Arts Magazine
"Di Blasi’s economy of writing is so spare that there are moments when I think of chapters here as being not unlike Hemingway’s Nick Adam stories, his very best work. Or possibly influence by the work of Wright Morris, who more than anyone, found a style that wedded what was powerful about both Faulkner & Hemingway, and who also took that great plain that is Nebraska, Kansas & Missouri as his subject as well."
– Ron Silliman, poet & critic
INTERVIEWS online
(selected)
The Brooklyn Rail (with Joe Milazzo)
Jamming Their Transmissions (podcast)
The Rupture Magazine
Ploughshares
HTMLGiant
Forbes
The Brooklyn Rail (with Liz Axelrod)