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author of ARGUMENTS (@perseabooks '26) & WEST PORTAL, founder @soccerwoborders

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ARGUMENTS has a cover!

Immense gratitude to @fabiandehi for his painting “Hold Me.” When I saw it, I fell in love with its narrative arc, the way it might soften the harshness of the word “Arguments,” and the way its swirling acrylic colors mirror the inner world of this book: a speaker trying to build a family, a self, and an ethical life within systems that wound what they depend on.

The book is out October 6th from @perseabooks and is now available for pre-order.

It would mean the world to me if you’d consider spending some time with it.

If the collection feels like it might resonate in a classroom, reading group, or conversation you’re part of, or if you’d like a review copy, please let me know.

So much love and appreciation for everyone who has helped shape these poems (and me) over the years.

Cover design by @smallstuffnyc by @benjamin_gucciardi

281

5 months ago

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Benjamin Gucciardi (benjamin_gucciardi)’s poem “The Rungs” praises classrooms where the language of shared experience speaks more than words can.

Thanks to @uofupress for permission to feature Benjamin’s poem.

🎧 Link in bio.

Accompany your life with poetry — new episodes every Monday and Friday through July.

📷 @ahopehale
Film processed by @moodysfilm by @benjamin_gucciardi

503

3 years ago

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One week from today! We welcome Benjamin Gucciardi to celebrate the release of his latest poetry collection, ARGUMENTS, out now from @perseabooks. Gucciardi will be joined by fellow poet Cintia Santana, with special readings by students from the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.

Free to attend, RSVP appreciated. Do so at the link in our bio or at greenapplebooks.com/events. See you then!

🟠About Arguments🟠
Winner of the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, Arguments is an innovative collection that explores inner conflict, ethical action and the eroding ties between self, family, community and the land.

In “Anima Hominis,” Yeats writes, “We make out of our quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Arguments by Benjamin Gucciardi takes that inner quarrel as its starting point. Written in a time of environmental collapse and social unrest, these poems confront the contradictions that shape contemporary life: how to make a self, a family and an ethical life within exploitative systems that demand complicity. Moving through domestic spaces, a climate activist camp, and landscapes of the American West, the collection blends lyric and formal poems to ask urgent questions: What responsibilities to we bear to one another? How are we entangled in the systems we seek to dismantle? What place does violent resistance hold? How do we sustain an inner life in a material-driven world—and how, in the face of grief, do we balance private mourning with collective obligation? Arguments turns to language as a practice of care, tending the fragile links between self and community, human and non-human, the living and the dead.
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[ID: Graphic reads “Ben Gucciardi featuring Cintia Santana, and poetry by students from the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts. Thursday, Oct. 15. 7pm. 1231 9th Ave (Inner Sunset). Free to Attend, Please RSVP. Green Apple Books” The graphic features author photos of Gucciardi and Santana, as well as the cover of Arguments, an abstract watercolor with yellow, orange, and cerulean.] taken in Green Apple Books on the Park by @benjamin_gucciardi

8 days ago

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Overwhelmed with gratitude for the confluence of community from ages 2–85: a U.S. Poet Laureate and friends attending their first poetry reading; a 70-degree night in the Bay Area; the creek; sounds of swings and seesaws as kids played in the park (somehow quietly?) in the background; flameless candles; flatbread and stewed chickpeas; the owls singing along; an empty cooler of seltzer water and a full one of beer (maybe no one drinks anymore?); the efforts of friends to brave traffic, find babysitters, sit in the growing dark to listen and feel.

Aracelis’ radiant poems. Jesse’s heartfelt welcome and introductions. People I’ve known since I was five and people I met for the first time. Oak trees, string lights, dusk. The kindness of friends who set up and broke down. Crickets. Sitting with Lauren after we’d packed up and everyone had gone home.

I truly can’t imagine a better way to bring a book into the world, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who came out and welcomed Arguments and supported me.

Altered by the love, and sending it back to all of you threefold. taken in John Hinkel Park by @benjamin_gucciardi

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9 days ago

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It’s pub day for Arguments by Benjamin Gucciardi, winner of the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky Editors’ Choice Award! This urgent, poignant collection about fatherhood and ecotage (among other things) is available from your favorite indie bookseller and at www.perseabooks.com. Ben will be reading from the book throughout the fall—swipe left for his tour dates. Come out to hear him and amazing co-readers like Lauren Markham, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Jane Hirschfeld, Edgar Kunz, Rebecca Solnit, Stacie Cassarino, and others!

Cover art: @fabiandehi
Cover design: @smallstuffnyc

#poetry #pubday #lexirudnitsky #poetsofcalifornia by @benjamin_gucciardi

146

10 days ago

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This week at The Poetry Shop we're excited to offer new books... We (Graywolf Press) by Layli Long Soldier; Cocklebur (Copper Canyon Press) by Erin Belieu; Lion: Poems (W.W. Norton & Company) by Tina Chang; Doggerel (W.W. Norton & Company) by Reginald Dwayne Betts; Cameo (Knopf Publishing Group) Mary Jo Salter; and Arguments: Poems (Persea) by Benjamin Gucciardi. For these, and more new books, visit thepoetryshop.com.

We
Layli Long Soldier
@layli.longsoldier
@graywolfpress

Cocklebur
Erin Belieu
@poet.erin.belieu
@copper_canyon_press

Lion: Poems
Tina Chang
@tinachang_poet
@w.w.norton

Doggerel
Reginald Dwayne Betts
@dwaynebetts
@w.w.norton

Cameo
Mary Jo Salter
@aaknopf

Arguments: Poems
Benjamin Gucciardi
@benjamin_gucciardi
@perseabooks

#poetrybooks #newpoetry #poetryrecommendations by @benjamin_gucciardi

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11 days ago

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So excited to see dear friends in these places and to read with heroes and beloved writers this fall. Please come out if you can! by @benjamin_gucciardi

134

15 days ago

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October is my favorite month in the Bay Area and I’m hoping El Niño rains will hold off so we can share an evening of crickets and owls and a few poems in between at John Hinkel Park, a little stone amphitheater in the Berkeley Hills. I went up there the other night and read some poems to the empty seats, surrounded by all that quiet and radial focus. I am mostly looking forward to seeing Aracelis read there.

I first started engaging more seriously with poetry around the time Aracelis’ Kingdom Animalia came out, and I’m very fortunate a mentor of mine gave me that book, which is so attentive and generous in how it holds the human and the non-human. Aracelis’ work has meant a great deal to me for a long time, and I’m truly humbled and grateful to have a chance to read with her on the day Arguments comes into the world. I hope you can join! It’s helpful to register (link in bio or here: https://luma.com/4ljpaw1d) so I can send some info about parking, staying warm etc… as it will be a bit of an adventure! With many thanks to @eastbaybooksellers for supporting the event and to @perseabooks for everything. ❤️ by @benjamin_gucciardi

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22 days ago

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I took a copy of Arguments (finished copies just came!) up to my favorite spot on Mt. Tamalpais the other day to spend some time with it before it goes out in the world, and to remember some of what went into making it. Times when I could follow sound instead of logic, an image shaking me in half-sleep, reading someone else’s poem and finally figuring out why my line wasn’t working, cherished conversations with friends about how to make the poems more themselves…

A book of poems isn’t really a commercial object. And yet it feels hard to resist measuring its worth by things like sales, praise, likes, attention. Gravity.

I’ve been reading Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, and she writes that gravity is not the opposite of grace, but another entry point into it. I’m trying to remember that. Of course I’d love for Arguments to “do well.” I’d love for it to find readers, to be read and talked about and carried into other lives.

But mostly I hope the book and everything it carries finds its way to where it’s welcome. by @benjamin_gucciardi

239

a month ago

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The 3rd edition of the Sundial Reading Series is this Thursday, September 3rd, from 6–8PM! Please join us at Local Economy to support @westoaklandeip and hear luminous writers @mononoke97 , @alexismadrigal & Mukethe Kawinzi read. @laurenemarkham will lead a conversation between the authors and WOEIP Executive Director Veronica Eady.

For more than 20 years, West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project has fought for healthy homes, schools, and neighborhoods in West Oakland, where freeways, port traffic, heavy industry, and toxic soil have exposed residents to disproportionate environmental and health risks.

In 2008, WOEIP launched a groundbreaking neighborhood air-monitoring project, training residents to carry air monitors in backpacks and measure pollution block by block. Their work helped demonstrate that air quality could vary by as much as eight times within a single block.

The event is free for Local Economy members and pay-what-you-wish for non-members. All proceeds support WOEIP.

Come hear beautiful writing and support this incredible organization! Register at the link in bio or at thelocaleconomy.com. taken in Oakland, California by @benjamin_gucciardi

2 months ago

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Almost 4 at sea / 3 lines from Adonis / the 2 most beautiful people I know / Almost 1 in Sardinia. Happy 4th birthday beloved Clio! I love discovering the world with you. by @benjamin_gucciardi

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2 months ago

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$Thanks to Publishers Weekly for the lovely review of Benjamin Gucciardi's ARGUMENTS, a "thoughtful and emotionally resonant" work of environmental and familial conscience. Preorder the book on Persea's website at a 20% discount using discount code "ARGUE20". Link in bio. #environmentalism #poetry #california #fracking #ecotage by @benjamin_gucciardi$

121

3 months ago

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Ben Gucciardi

@benjamin_gucciardi