Kostas Anagnopoulos : Night Painting

As experimental as Stein, and as personal as O’Hara, Anagnopoulos creates his own mesmerizing language in this ripe, delicate collection. These are poems as immediate and intimate as an unlocked diary. The result is a wild and liberating work filled with tenderness.

 — Ira Sachs 

I admire the clarity, simplicity, and casual elegance of these poems. Kostas Anagnopoulos’ style is distinctive: keenly perceptive, playful, practical, and impractical at the same time, not trying to convince or coerce, remarkably free from hype —“Trees need no introduction/everyone knows sap when it flows.” Throughout this substantial collection, Anagnopoulos writes about the business of life — cooking, doing laundry, running errands, making money, having sex, and keeping appointments, all at a brisk pace, never “wasting precious momentum/while the sun goes down on you.” It’s delightful to spend a day, a night, a weekend or more with these poems. You’ll come away refreshed!

 — Elaine Equi

Everyone has disconnected thoughts and impressions. But Kostas Anagnopoulos is master of a hidden syntax that reveals how even the most transitory perceptions serve together in one’s own redemptive dynamic of courage, reflection, and care. Reading his quicksilver yet reconstituting poems in Night Painting can leave you ready—it did me—to count him as a vivid exemplar, perhaps confiding counsel, and certainly as a friend.

 — Douglas Crase

Night Painting is a play (noun and verb) with words. The poet observes the minute and the abstract yielding short phases that are pictures with a proclivity for the quotidian: ‘skimming all the while with a slotted spoon’, ‘the cake is inverted’, ‘blowing bags into the trees.’ Anagnopoulos is looking, changing, asking. Objects exist proffering beauty and solace. You move on, filling our eyes.

— Nancy Shaver

Kostas Anagnopoulos was born in Chicago on November 20, 1974. His first book of poetry, Moving Blanket, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse (2010). He is the proprietor of two stores in Oak Hill, New York: Pidgin and Norman Hasselriis. In the long-standing tradition of poets publishing poets, he runs the small press Insurance Editions, through which he publishes the work of peers he admires. Anagnopoulos also volunteers at his local library, where he leads Poet Hour, a free intergenerational reading and writing program. He divides his time between Rensselaerville, New York, and Jackson Heights, Queens, where he lives with his husband and daughter.

Printed in January 2026 by BookMobile in Minneapolis. Typeset in Sabon, a descendant of the types of Claude Garamond designed by Jan Tschichold in 1964. Design by Kyle Schlesinger with cover art by Katrien de Blauwer.

LIMITED EDITION: Twenty-six copies have been lettered and signed by the poet and artist.

PAPERBACK. 5.5x9.25 inches. 178 pages. 2026.
ISBN: 978-1-950055-16-6