Pupa is an utterly distinctive book, lyrical and lovely in its summoning up the ingenious persistence of insects with their curious beauty "fluttering through nothingness." Entomania, with metaphysical conceits "to keep the earth from falling out of love with you"

--John Balaban, author of Path, Crooked Path and Locusts on the Edge of Summer

Samuel Piccone’s landscapes inhabit his characters, father and mother, neighbor, friend, wife, and that habitation both haunts and heralds, binds and rends the man he is becoming, unraveled by the transformative power of language, a transparent chrysalis that reveals the wet wings of the churning world. An evocative and moving first collection.

--Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men