James Wm. Chichetto

The Boston Phoenix; The Manhattan Review; The Other Side; International Voices Review; The Colorado Review; America Magazine; Poem Magazine; Harper's Magazine; The Tablet (London); The Connecticut Poetry Review; Mr. Cogito; The Boston Globe; Christian Century; Combat Literary Magazine; The Vision: Native American Poetry Anthology; Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust; Commonweal; Gargoyle Magazine (Cambridge); American Poets of the 1990s; And What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century; The National Catholic Reporter; East West Literary Journal; Anthology of Magazine Verse Yearbook of American Poetry (1986–88), etc.

Dan Carr, poet and editor (Golgonooza Letter and Foundry Press) and one of his first publishers (Stones, A Litany), notes how Chichetto's poems are "well crafted and strong," especially in regard to their "lyrical power" and "elegiac sympathy" for the exploited and defeated. He also notes that his longest poem, "Stones, A Litany," about the great stones of Cuzco, Peru, has "been performed successfully with music." Edwin Honig, poet, playwright, and professor emeritus (Brown University), says this about his earlier work, Victims: "This is an impressive selection of work by a vigorous young talent....Evocations of Sitting Bull and Herman Melville spin from Chichetto's mind -- a stark energy fuses with his special tenderness. Chichetto's forms are varied and skilled...I will watch for more of his work." Of all the observers of Chichetto's earlier poetry, possibly Robert Peters, poet, critic, and professor emeritus (UCLA, Irvine), has been the most insightful, supportive, and nuanced in appraising it. For example, he praises him for "staging himself through Gilgamesh in Gilgamesh and Other Poems, notes the "beauty of the poems" in general, and singles out lines from his "favorite poem" ("Sugar Cane Fields in Peru"). In Homage to Father Edward Sorin, Peters quotes lines from one of the longer poems of the work, "Fr. Sorin and the Great Fire at Notre Dame, 1879" ("possibly the best"), noting the book as a whole "is an important contribution to the 'voice portrait' genre": He spits into some ashes, turns cinder over with his foot. He pushes some strands of hair from his forehead, then brushes his shoulder. He reaches into the debris for an old door knob, then motionless stands over the door in black silence. Later he walks toward the lakes. He looks out over the plowlines and across the great silence of water. "The sky of Indiana still stirs in the lakes," he thinks. "I can still labor." That night, throwing his cassock on a chair, he strips to his waist to wash. Currently four volumes of Chichetto's epic poem, The Dream of Norumbega, are out in paperback. Book IV was reissued under a different publisher and title, George Washington's Wars With His Slave, Ona Judge. The first chapter (Emily Dickinson at Wounded Knee) of Book V was published separately in 2026.