Now It's Dark: New Poems

Author: Peter Gizzi

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press (2020)

The poems in this brilliant follow-up to the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, "Gizzi's poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion." With litany, elegy, and prose, Gizzi continues his pursuit toward a lyric of reality. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom.

"This new poetry, taking such care of tem-perature—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

"Gizzi is not a sentimental poet—not even close. His best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive forHe identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen."

–Amanda Petrsich, The New Yorker

"There's no ego in this writer's work. It's one of the purest examples of truth told from an inside source, beautifully patterned on the page. There's no training ground for such writing. Every page, every poem, is challenged with unpredictability and intensity."

–Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent