Both Di Blasi’s style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer.

Publishers Weekly
Debra Di Blasi

Debra Di Blasi

Debra Di Blasi grew up on a sprawling cattle farm in rural northern Missouri. She studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia under poets Larry Levis and Thomas McAfee and fiction writer Speer Morgan. She eventually graduated from Kansas City Art Institute and studied creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her fiction has appeared in New Letters, Sou’wester, New Delta Review, Cottonwood, Colorado-North Review and in an anthology of women’s writing. Two of her stories, including Drought, are the basis for experimental films. Ms. Di Blasi lives in Kansas City, Missouri and works as a Learning Specialist at the Kansas City Art Institute.

cover image of the book Drought

Drought

Debra Di Blasi writes from the heart of the Postmodern American Gothic. A native Missourian, she plumbs the depths of psychosexual repercussion and searing sentiment behind the region’s parched, pitchfork-bearing façade. Though her writing has been widely published in literary journals, Drought, paired here with a second novella, Say What You Like, is a stunning first foray into book form. In Drought, Di Blasi dissects a young couple’s relationship on a failing cattle ranch, allowing us to see all the subcutaneous mental and physical violence they endure. As unceasing heat kills the couple’s livestock, Di Blasi focuses a science writer’s exactitude and a poet’s charged restraint on the human cost of rural tragedy. Say What You Like offers an even more ruthless examination of a couple’s deep-seated pain. Pared down to short, numbered sections, the relationship of a nameless “He” and “She” is laid bare by Di Blasi’s unflinching skill with the scalpel. Debra Di Blasi is a daring young writer of the top order.

More Information

Both Di Blasi’s style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer.

Publishers Weekly

Both Di Blasi’s style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer.

Publshers Weekly

People content to name the will’s inevitable defeat ‘God’ or ‘History’ will not long endure these restless stories. Di Blasi writes for the rest of us, the comfortless unconfessed of us.

H.L. Hix
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