Fierce Elegy

Peter Gizzi¿s powerful new collection reckons with the transformative power of elegy, through poems of lament and loveIn 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