Domestica

About

Winner, 2026 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

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.

Author

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.

Praise

“Samuel Piccone’s debut collection, Domestica, 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.”
—Leila Chatti, author of Wildness Before Something Sublime

“By ‘praying in the wrong direction,’ Samuel Piccone’s Domestica presents itself as both brutal and tender. Here, the center becomes the outskirt—fatherhood an echo, a marriage an armful of tallboys and feathers, death and prayer, prairie and desert. These are poems of motion and pivot. Through this, Piccone brings us a restless collection of damage and helps us find light by looking toward the dark. I am astonished by the honesty in these poems.”
—Leah Poole Osowski, author of Exceeds Us

“Here is the wise and vulnerable voice I have been searching for. A voice within four walls, who opens the windows of that room to let history and the natural world pour in, so that meaning is made. These are some of the truest and most well-crafted poems I have read in a long time. Here is a book of a generation. Domestica is the example when we say it is not a book but a life.”
—Tyree Daye, author of a little bump in the earth

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