The Outernationale

"The Outernationale is a remarkable book: in poem after poem, nerve flares into shimmering gauze."—John Palattella, Boston Review

"Among the many things that strike me about (his) language, perhaps the first is how forthright and openhearted it is. Odd, perhaps, to say about writing that's also mysterious, but those two adjectives, along with 'brave' and 'sensuous' sum up my feelings for The Outernationale."—Richard Silsberg, Poetry Flash

"Peter Gizzi's The Outernationale is magnificent. It gives me what I need from poetry—a reminder to feel alive. He remembers that a shiver of sensation is vital, it's the first thing, before mere message or artful phrasing."—Ange Mlinko, Harriet, Poetry Foundation blog

"Among the many things that strike me about (his) language, perhaps the first is how forthright and openhearted it is. Odd, perhaps, to say about writing that's also mysterious, but those two adjectives, along with 'brave' and 'sensuous' sum up my feelings for The Outernationale."—Richard Silsberg, Poetry Flash

"Peter Gizzi's disturbing lyricism is like no other—the innermost whir of the daily curtain rising on outer catastrophe. His phrasing can wrench the heart, his eye refracts ordinary light into acute images. In The Outernationale we are 'listening to a life/unlived any other way'—unmistakably, as poetry."—Adrienne Rich

"Peter Gizzi's achingly beautiful poems create tiny openings for being – the whole lonely, searching grandeur of a one—to find and examine its contours between the conditions of 'what happened' and 'what's happening.' One might be sung down from a ledge by this book's insistence on 'the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time' and its acute rendering of the range of human feeling in all its complicated, ordinary marrow.'"—Anselm Berrigan

"Catching sight of 'gravity and fire' in these Gizzi poems singing Sun, I knew, in addition to so much else, there wd be music... I knew I wd find here something threshold, connXing us back to the 'nation' and 'language' and passim song and it's there, deep into the pages... This new poetry, taking such care of temperature - 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