In Defense of Nothing
Selected Poems, 1987–2011
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015)
Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance—in Gizzi’s work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi’s poetry enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. In Defense of Nothing is an immensely valuable introduction to the work of this extraordinary and singular poet. Check for the online reader’s companion at http://petergizzi.site.weleyan.edu.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the more prominent voices in contemporary American poetry, Gizzi (Threshold Songs) works in a style that is as innovative as it is singular and unique. These poems, taken from five different collections, are in places comedic and playful, elsewhere elegiac and devastatingly honest, reflecting a careful approach to form and a finely tuned musical ear. Much of the work tends to stack its images, oscillating between the concrete and the ethereal as it gains momentum: "The heart of poetry," Gizzi writes in "Pierced," "is fatigue/ what the teachers left unsaid/ a whimpering man inside the child," but also "a skinny leg inside a blown out shoe/ at the side of the ocean." Throughout, moments of self-consciousness emerge, interrogating the capability of language in representing experience. In "Revival," an elegiac call to Gregory Corso, the voice declares: "I was talking about rending, reading, rewriting/ what is seen.../ I want an art that can say what I am feeling." Gizzi's poetry is "silly with clarity," infused with a restless vernacular that can elevate the mundane while making the impossible tangible.
