Fierce Elegy

OCEAN VUONG

‘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’

BEN LERNER

‘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’

RAE ARMANTROUT

'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’