You, Caravaggio

Praise for You, Caravaggio (Pine Row Press, 2024):

For the aficionado of art history or ekphrastic poetry or the poetry lover, this stunning collection is equally intended. The tempestuous personal life of Caravaggio finds compelling rendition as painting after painting tell his story. I know of no other book of ekphrastic poetry like this one.
—Peter Cooley
Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing, Tulane University, 1975-2018, former Louisiana Poet Laureate, author of The Van Gogh Notebook

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David Starkey’s intimate, living portrait of Caravaggio in the second person is as much a dialog with the language of excess, exegesis, exile, and poesis, as it is with the masterful brushstrokes that defined a painter. The unanswered questions about Caravaggio’s life, the silences and darkness, are manifest through Starkey’s curiosity and vivid rendering, a biography befitting both the dramatic arc of the painter’s life and our yearning relationship to art and to history.
—Carrie Patterson
Editor, The Nomadic Journal

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Starkey writes with a fine hand and sympathetic eye, and thanks to his skill, we, as readers, walk with Caravaggio through his increasingly troubled life. Suffering was Caravaggio’s old familiar, anger his nemesis. Art, his pearl of great price. In Rome, that city of a thousand ruined nights, as the burning sun rolled over into dusk, his people came out–rogues and rough-talkers, sword-wielders, courtesans and con men, gamers and desperate girls, all hungry by torchlight in that city of shadows, city of nets,the wide-eyed boys in lace waiting–Caravaggio, among his people. He painted the only world he knew–the one he was given–and we are the richer for his vision. What a joy to come this close to his towering and beset genius through the poetic gifts of David Starkey. This is audacious and ferocious poetry.
—Marsha de la O
Author of Creature and Every Ravening Thing