Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness contains selections taken from Simone Di Piero’s notebooks going back thirty years. His notebooks offer evidence of a poet’s inner life and have been for him a kind of mute conversation partner. They testify in an episodic way to one poet’s encounters with the world. Di Piero’s materials include life’s personal day-to-day debris, as well as reflections on the art of poetry, painting, photography, music, the American character, and urban life. Mickey Rourke is a still-in-progress excavation of the contents of consciousness. “W. S. Di Piero is probably the most consistently compelling and idiosyncratic prose writer among contemporary American poets.” —Poetry