Contemporary best sellers this week

This week, Peter Gizzi’s Threshold Songs debuts at #20 on the contemporary best-seller list. Possibly Gizzi’s most personal book to date, the poems in this collection explore themes of personal loss in vibrant lyrical intensity with a sense of the poet’s “bewilderment as a citizen in the world.” Publisher’s Weekly describes Gizzi’s poems as “…filled with the same intricacies that enamor us of certain songs: the rhythmic flourishes startle but never betray his cadence, the timbres of his words share as much dissonance as they do harmony, and over everything is the lyric, the voice, speaking to us with urgency and occasion.” Also new on the list this week at #13 is Toi Derricotte’s The Undertaker’s Daughter and Sharon Cumberland’s Peculiar Honors, which rounds out the list at #30.