Fierce Elegy

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

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