Domestica, winner of the 2026 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is now available for pre-order.
“Samuel Piccone’s debut collection, Domestica,” writes poet Leila Chatti, “is a field study of the quiet, (extra)ordinary labors that hold a family together. With a voice at once tender and devastatingly funny, Domestica lays bare the grit that is commitment beyond the dress and party: the urgent loneliness of marriage, the metamorphic bewilderment of fatherhood, the ferocious mundanity of love, love that exhausts and endures, love that is all. These poems illuminate the private realm as it is, as it really is, with radiant honesty—to read them is like looking into a house at night with its windows lit up.”
Samuel Piccone’s Domestica firmly plants its feet at the fraught intersection of inheritance and the escape from it. Across these interrogative poems, the routines of marriage, parenthood, and faith reside in a place where “every garden is erased / by the thrum of impermanence.” If “silence is the earth’s way of embracing us / in whatever loneliness we think we deserve,” Piccone seeks whatever answers are held in the deepest recesses of that silence. At once aphoristic and vulnerable, these poems insist that “the stars are there to ache us into asking whatever we haven’t / brought ourselves to ask.” To startle us into paying attention to the world.
Samuel Piccone is the author of the chapbook Pupa. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Sycamore Review, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, and RHINO. He serves as poetry editor at Raleigh Review and is a lecturer at Iowa State University.
Domestica will be published in March 2026.