Peter Gizzi lives and works in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. Threshold Songs is his fifth collection.
The voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. At once conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body’s chemistry and its effects on expression and form.
“Gizzi’s poems reach persistently for what comes to seem like the ghost of the beauty of the world.”
—Rae Armantrout
“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
“…he differentiates himself…by pushing his poems toward a place where the making of meaning is still his foremost desire, especially in this, his fifth, and most personal book.”
—Publishers Weekly
Wesleyan University Press
