Fierce Elegy

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection reckons with the transformative power of elegy, through poems of lament and love In March 2021, Peter Gizzi was diagnosed with a very rare blood disease. This book is what followed- composed slowly and painstakingly, though for Gizzi with unprecedented speed; written with an eye as much to his own impending mortality as to a decade of losses of friends and family, yet suffused, beautifully, with music and light. The book's broad subject is elegy, which Gizzi calls 'a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.' Here, ferocity is reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth. Joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. And then, as we read, it is as if we have left our bodies, are looking down on them from above, and find - as Rae Armantrout has put it in an appreciation of this book - that 'everything is fine, better than fine.' In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament, but also - as it has been for centuries - a work of openness, and a work of love. 'Gizzi's best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive for... He identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen' The New Yorker

Reviews

"In Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan Univ., Aug.), poems on ferocious heartbrokenness also attest to joy."--Library Journal
"These poems are assertions of a spiritual excess that won't die."--Fanny Howe, author of Love and I

"Having read Peter Gizzi's work through the immense and singular wingspan his books make, I am still awestruck and dumbfounded as to how these poems are made. This book believes in language. It also offers it the utmost reverence: by lowering it to human height, where the living are. What a masterwork of deft maneuvering within the dynamo Gizzi has made of the lyric."--Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother

"The title says this collection is one poem, and it is, with its repeated vocabulary, shades-of-winter mood, and virtuoso singing. Amazing single poems. The elegy keeps naming itself, enjoying its form. So you can love it."--Alice Notley, author of The Descent of Alette

"These poems are elegies. Or these poems are about being torn apart and floating free. They come from an old place where grief overlaps with beauty. Gizzi is a poet of disembodied brightness. Reading Gizzi is almost like having a near death experience, you know those accounts from people who have nearly died and who say they left their bodies, looked down on them from above, and everything was fine, better than fine. Gizzi's writing invokes and produces something like that, a near religious ecstasy, but one with no God in sight. It's as if he has learned to give up control and still find perfect balance riding whatever carries his voice. If anyone tells you the lyric is dead, give them Peter Gizzi."--Rae Armantrout, author of Finalists

Author Bio

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.