Peter Gizzi Featured in This Week's New Yorker

The New Yorker gives Peter Gizzi some love, as Amanda Petrusich reckons with the poet's newest collection, Archeophonics (Wesleyan), itself a reckoning with time. It's perhaps Gizzi's most personal book, writes Petrusich.

...[I]t is tender, lyric, strange, and chatty. He writes from a place of deep intimacy with loss, as if he has locked eyes with “the fragility of the world and of being,” as he described it to me recently. (His father was killed in a plane crash when he was young; his brother, the poet Michael Gizzi, died in 2010.) He addresses those feelings of loss and rebirth by conjuring odd and unexpected visions. In “When Orbital Proximity Feels Creepy,” he writes, “I am making my way in some dark room / looking for other structures to love”—a piercing summation of what it feels like to navigate grief. And then he follows with an invitation for wilding, for a bold and brazen rediscovery:

That I saw a blood-orange ball caught out my window. That I’m listening to light and it said time. I’m listening to time, it says ha. You need to be howling at bloody torn space. You need to be spooked out of your hidey-hole and its glowing mess.

Or this, from “Strangeness Becomes You,” a poem about impoverishment, and anger toward the rich:

To know something and fail. Why discount it? The onslaught of eyes Beneath a fuck-you sky.

Though Gizzi is speaking directly here to the anguish of certain disparities—all the failures of the so-called old language and the ways it ties us to cruelty, idiocy (“I hate that, when syntax / connects me to the rich,” he writes)—the poem works, for me, as a lesson in empathy. It is also exceptionally hard to shake off the phrase “fuck-you sky,” which I have imagined for myself at least a hundred different ways (usually sunny, cloudless).

Read all of "Peter Gizzi, a Poet of Sound and Time" at the New Yorker.