Threshold Songs

"He differentiates himself by pushing his poems toward a place where the making of meaning is st ill his foremost desire, especially in this, his fifth, and most personal book."—Publishers Weekly

"Peter Gizzi's poems have always walked a line between stylized opacity and friendly, if melancholy, accessibility, enacting an argument about whether language is esoteric or generic, personal or public, our salvation from commerce or hopelessly commoditized. This argument is at the heart of much contemporary poetry, but for Gizzi it also represents an interior struggle between the need to disclose emotion with words and the need to hide it behind words. The interplay between these two ideas has never been stronger than in his new collection."—Craig Morgan Teicher, Bookforum

"Gizzi's fifth collection, is his most profoundly rueful and wildly humoured work to date. This is a wintry 'un gathering' of poems, sung in the name of 'Tradition & The Indivisible Talent' – a company whose ghosts include Basil Bunting, W.S. Graham and the late R.F. Langley."—Best Books of 2011, Times Literary Supplement

"Gizzi's fifth collection, is his most profoundly rueful and wildly humoured work to date. This is a wintry 'un gathering' of poems, sung in the name of 'Tradition and The Indivisible Talent' – a company whose ghosts include Basil Bunting, W.S. Graham, and the late R.F. Langley."—Best Books of 2011, Times Literary Supplement

"(Gizzi's) innovation has been to treat the lyric like a big radio antenna, simultaneously transmitting and receiving eerie broadcasts from the air."—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"Gizzi's poems reach persistently for what comes to seem like the ghost of the beauty of the world."—Rae Armantrout, Harriet blog, poetryfoundation.org

"Threshold Songs, as the title suggests, pushes against both abstraction and lyric voicing, ensnaring the close listener in an intensifying cascade of dissociative rhythms and discursive constellations. Songs also say, saying also sings. And what at first seems to resist song becomes song. These enthralling, sometime soaring, poems approach, without dwelling in, elegy. They are the soundtrack of a political and cultural moment whose echoic presence Gizzi makes as viscous as the 'dark blooming surfs of winter ice.'"—Charles Bernstein

"Gizzi's poems reach persistently for what comes to seem like the ghost of the beauty of the world."—Rae Armantrout, Harriet blog, poetryfoundation.org