Skirts and SlacksBy: W. S. Di Piero W. S. Di Piero, a fresh and powerful voice in American poetry, opens this collection about public and private worlds with poems that revisit the deaths of his parents. It is an important adult passage for him, and for them a last chance to leave a message: his father lying in bed, bemused and contemptuous of the hell in which he lay; his mother soon to be laid out in the cheap gold flats that made her look young and men look twice.