Fierce Elegy

Peter Gizzi is the author of many collections of poetry including Now It’s Dark (2020), Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award (2016), Threshold Songs (2011), and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (2014). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. Marjorie Perloff has called him ‘a master of the mot juste’; Robert Creeley, ‘one of the most exceptional poets of his generation’. Adrienne Rich has said ‘his disturbing lyricism is like no other’; and John Ashbery thought him ‘the most exciting new poet to come along in quite a while’. He lives in Holyoke, MA.

A breathtaking book-length sequence in which each line or sentence, often paratactic, non-hierarchical, could be a poem in its own right. As if wordings had been gifted to him out of the ether, one-liners, two-liners coalesce into love lyrics, or a thought enters his head which, step by step, he unravels until a nucleus is reached and pierced