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Peter Gizzi

  • About
  • Reviews
  • PETER GIZZI is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, Archeophonics (Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award), In Defense of Nothing, and Threshold Songs. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships in poetry from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has twice been the recipient of The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. His editing projects have included o·blēk: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, and, with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. He is on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
    Praise for Peter Gizzi 'A poet of almost unmatched intensity, and its frequent cousin, doubt: unwaveringly masculine and open-hearted, often puzzling his way passionately through an idée fixe... This book is a commendable introduction to an often puzzling, absorbing, increasingly original body of work that can be the stuff of fascination, if you're prepared to move slowly and live with disorientations'
    Rory Waterman, TLS
    'It's an outstanding piece of work, and there's a sense in which it encapsulates Gizzi's achievement as a lyric poet, as the strategies and concerns found in it can be traced throughout his career.'
    Alan Baker, Litter Magazine
    'The poems are continually arresting and expansive, containing Whitmanian multitudes. The result is enjoyably overwhelming... There is so much interesting foam flying off these poems, that read like light glinting off stacked objects in an opened storage unit stuffed to the brim with salvage from the car boot of American poetry, or like Emily Dickinson listening to bees; 'Like trains of cars on tracks of plush'.'

    Lucy Mercer, The White Review
    'This collection superbly represents a body of work spanning over thirty years that assembles from the ether a whole history of the lyric tradition'

    Matthew James Holman, Poetry London
    'It's a finely nuanced piece of verbal craftsmanship, a not-quite-symmetrical set of stanzas that teases and pleases the eye on the page as much as the listening ear.'

    Carol Rumens, from The Guardian where 'Song' was Poem of the Week on 11th February

    The marvelous concept of 'hopescape' is one of the many gifts of Peter Gizzi's Sky Burial, where life is a constant calling to art. Gizzi's songs float free of judgmentalism, in an unflinching appreciation of being. They seek, and they love. Gizzi uncouples poetic vision from the visual, provoking us ever further, into the luminous dark.
    Vahni Capildeo
    Gizzi can move from the ghostly flickering edge of perceptibility to focused intensity at disorienting, Dickinsonian speed. His poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion; Gizzi is gathering from the air a live tradition.
    Ben Lerner
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