Speech Acts for a Dying World

Author: Peter Gizzi

Publisher: Students of Decay with O-Blek Editions (2022)

is a generous selection of Peter Gizzi’s acclaimed poetry of the last decade. There are new poems alongside poems from the collections, Now It’s Dark (2020), Archeophonics, (2016), In Defense of Nothing (2014), and Threshold Songs (2011). These poems 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 enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. As Ben Lerner has written, “Gizzi is gathering from the air a live tradition.” These recordings were made in November of 2021 at Sonelab in Easthampton, MA. In these poems we discover a deep intimacy, where thinking and feeling, searching, cresting, turning, loving are all knotted and happening together.