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- Now It's Dark
A new collection of poems from one of America's most vital and imaginative poets
The poems in this brilliant follow-up to the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, "Gizzi's 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." With litany, elegy, and prose, Gizzi continues his pursuit toward a lyric of reality. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom.
LYRIC • SPEECH ACTS FOR A DYING WORLD • THAT I SAW THE LIGHT ON NONOTUCK AVENUE • EVERY DAY I WANT TO FLY MY KITE•THE PRESENT IS CONSTANT ELEGY • SOME JOY FOR MORNING • SKY BURIAL NOW • IT'S DARK • THE AFTERLIFE OF PAPER • A LONELY PLANET GUIDE TO MY LIFE LAST POEM • LETTER TO THE GHOST WORLD INSIDE OUT • LOUD • THE INGENUITY OF ANIMAL SURVIVAL • OF THE AIR • ROXY MUSIC ARCHIVAL LIGHT • SUNDAY'S EMPIRE • A ROUND FOR W.S. GRAHAM • NOW IT'S DARK • SUNSHINE • GARLAND • MARIGOLD & CABLE • NOCTURNE • SHIP OF STATE • CODA • FROM THIS END OF SADNESS • Acknowledgments
PETER GIZZI is the author of eight collections of poetry including Archeophonics, Threshold Songs, and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. He lives in Holyoke, MA.
"This new poetry, taking such care of tem-perature—the time & details of the world—meaning the space(s) in which we live—defining love in this way. Writing along the edge. What I call MR/everydayMagicalRealism. A way of writing about hope."
~Kamau Brathwaite, author of The Lazarus Poems
"Gizzi is not a sentimental poet—not even close. His best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive forHe identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen."
~Amanda Petrsich, The New Yorker
"There's no ego in this writer's work. It's one of the purest examples of truth told from an inside source, beautifully patterned on the page. There's no training ground for such writing. Every page, every poem, is challenged with unpredictability and intensity."
~Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
"The ethereal yet confident poems in this book deliver their satisfying reckoning without a hint of sentimentality."
~Publishers Weekly
"In the title poem of his eighth book, Now It's Dark, Peter Gizzi strikes a Tennysonian note that calls to mind both the tone and imagery of "In Memoriam A. H. H.": "Sky opening into blank. / I thought grief is a form of grace." The poem proceeds through inflections confessional ("When my brother lost his voice I lost my childhood"), social ("I am overpowered by the gigantism / of commercial governing"), and existential ("I am an incident trapped in thick description), all the while maintaining a deceptive ease of expressiveness that belies the underground swell of disquiet, which marks the entire volume."
~Albert Mobillio, Hyperallergic
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