Rattle of the Sun

Rattle of the Sun (July 2025) by Gregg Orifici is a first collection of poems by this Vermont-based, far-flung journeying, poet/garden designer. Packed with plants who embody human eccentricities, passionate coming-of-age reflections on difference, detailed exultations on exotic and everyday places and off-beat, heart-gripping insights, these 100 pages of poems invite the reader into a cathartic embrace of love, laughter and full-spectrum color that eludes us each day unless we slow down and take notice.

This book is 10 years in the making and the first original manuscript for the Savannah-based, independent publisher Decatur Dixon Press.

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"Plainspoken and expansive, Orifici's poems are born of an impeccable ear and precise pitch; they embody a staggering range of personal experience and historical awareness, trajectories of remembered and present lives. Acute perceptions of ceaseless becoming... they convey what it is to exist on the physical and spiritual edge..."

- William O’Daly, author of The New Gods and translator of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Twilight
“Rattle of the Sun marks out the arc of a life whose worldly range is astonishingly wide–everything from the Camino de Santiago and the fall of the Berlin Wall to Farah Fawcett and pandemic onset, from a Sicilian palazzo to hill town Vermont...But Orifici’s spiritual journey is what’s really at stake here, the stops along that road rendered in intense, abundant detail. Sweet, cosmopolitan, satiric, wise, wry, soulful, self-doubting, impetuous, annoyed, curious, and more: this book has it all!"

– David Rivard, author of Standoff, winner of the PEN/New England Prize in Poetry
"Reading Rattle of the Sun was such a pleasure. The subjects of Italy, Vermont, and gardens are so appealing to me. And the poems are beautifully written: wonderful language and thoughtful complexities. I remember well being in Tuscany and really grasping that sadness- beauty connection and beauty is not a word I use lightly. And I too like to 'bask in anarchy'. This book is rich. "

- Lesle Lewis, author of Small Boat and Rainy Days on the Farm

READ

Wondering

Confession

The Secret Life of Gardeners

My Side of the Palazzo

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Rattle of the Sun

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Sicilian Sojourn