Fierce Elegy

"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

"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

"These poems are assertions of a spiritual excess that won't die."

~Fanny Howe, author of Love and I

"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

"In Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy, poems on ferocious heartbrokenness also attest to joy."

~Library Journal

"I know of no better companion to word our common lament for us, with us, than Gizzi's new Fierce Elegy. For those of us devoted already to his work, we'll find here the fullest condensation of his powers I know — poems of fearless questioning, muse-bruised, words with "a hunger / for real things," and the real things that hunger right back. For those who don't know his work, you'll discover one of this nation's foremost practitioners of lyric art, refusing that the poem should do anything less than posit one human life in actual relation with the world entire. His life, your life, mine — such are the fierce demands of love in a world where all one loves also leaves."

~Dan Beachy-Quick, Westword

"Gizzi is a master of the elegiac mode His subject isn't loss alone, but loss interwoven with afterlife. Shadows, reflections, mirrors, and migrating birds populate his poems, and he weaves one state of consciousness into another, like gossamer Fierce Elegy is lyrical and transcendent. It is also fierce in the sense that overcoming the broken world is the ultimate act of defiance."

~Amanda Holmes Duffy, Washington Independent Review

"With his last several collections, Peter Gizzi has distinguished himself as one of America's finest living poets. In his latest book, Fierce Elegy, we find the poet writing at the height of his powers."

~James O'Conner, Harvard Review

"Lyrics of resignation are juxtaposed with ecstatic lines that reimagine silence as 'conversations with the dead.' Spare and raked of impurities, these poems reside in an airy purgatory of the soul... In its beautiful, fiery insistence this collection redeclares the elegy as the undying practice of the living."

~Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Guardian

"In his latest book, we recognize Gizzi's distinctive voice, but its melancholy is even more intensified, now almost black as ink. We might call it lyric after catastrophe: the world has suffered blows, shocks, accidents, and destructions and things are no better for things, which are often as not broken, undone, burned, or ruined, 'language marching into empire / starving the words.' What remains now are no more than 'the ruins of anything.' And yet the book is a necessary reminder to continue to live, perhaps to love, and certainly to die."

~Stéphane Bouquet, Chicago Review

"For Gizzi, silence lives inside the poems, its words charged by it just as, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'the world is charged with the grandeur of God.' Fierce Elegy anneals its phrases to the clotted silences that surround them, so that rather than a continuous utterance, Gizzi's rhythms are those of words teased, wrested, chiseled, and siphoned out of the darkness, with all of the nuances of sound those operations imply. Fierce Elegy differs equally from elegies that establish strong ties to a tradition (e.g., Milton) and from those that imagine themselves as wholly anti-elegy (e.g., Plath and Ginsberg). It omits not only proper names but dead addressees altogether, and the affect set in most salient contrast to sadness is actually ecstasy."

~John Steen, The Poetry Project Newsletter