Soulful and intricate lyrics make this Gizzi's strongest book to date Archeophonics is the first collection of new work from the poet Peter Gizzi in five years. Archeophonics, defined as the archeology of lost sound, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one's emotional memory. The book takes seriously the opening epigraph by the late great James Schuyler: "poetry, like music, is not just song." It recognizes that the poem is not a decorative art object but a means of organizing the world, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, "into transient examples of shaped behavior." Archeophonics is a series of discrete poems that are linked by repeated phrases and words, and its themes and nothing less than joy, outrage, loss, transhistorical thought, and day-to-day life. It is a private book of public and civic concerns.

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 first critical book of essays on the poetry of Peter Gizzi shows how his work extends the traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism while also reclaiming the living presence of the “lyric” in its capacity to sing of the human predicament. Gizzi is author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, including most recently Threshold Songs and Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2016. Lauded contributors, including Ben Lerner, Michael Snediker, Marjorie Perloff, and Charles Altieri, explore Gizzi’s poetry for its embodiment of an American tradition—extending the poetics of Whitman, Dickinson, and Stevens, amongst others—while also exhibiting a twenty-first-century sensibility, perpetuating a new grammar and syntax to capture our place in the world today. Each essayist, in turn, works through close-readings of some of the most important poems of our times, enriching our understanding of a poetry of the mind which never loses track of what it means to feel.

A luminous new work for the 21st century

The Work-Shy painstakingly reconstructs a chorus of voices rescued from hermetic “colonies” and fragile communes, from worlds that work in ways that defy work as we know it. Its poetic assemblages offer direct testimony from the first youth prison in California and from asylums for the chronically insane (preserved in the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York City). Painful facts emerge about “sterilization mills” in California, where thousands of individuals became subject to compulsory procedures (policies that shaped eugenics practice in the Third Reich). In addition, the poems “translate” asylum texts--the writing of the insane--into a wider field of social conflict and utopian fragments of not-yet-being. Activating what Susan Howe calls “the telepathy of the archive” (and Peter Gizzi dubs “archeophonics” in the title of his latest collection), the poems of The Work-Shy become part of a “book of listening,” occupying identities rooted in the demimonde and in places of confinement. Voices echo to form a ragged chain of soliloquies, kenning and keening, riddles and rants. Published under the collective, anonymous signature of the BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, the book operates at the crossroads of lyric and documentary poetries, of singularity and collectivism. An online readers companion will be available at bluntresearchgroup.site.wesleyan.edu.

"The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth takes the side of the young--boys and girls, doomed and saved--as they weave their ways through ancient and modern times. The Boston Marathon bombers, Francis and Clare of Assisi, legendary nymphs, and urban nomads occupy this sequence of essays, poems, and tales, their stories and chronologies shifting and overlapping."--Back cover.

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools. Broadening the lens through which we look at contemporary poetry, this new volume extends our reading of each poet beyond the constraints of any one aesthetic, school, or movement; this volume pushes readers to see beyond the binary of lyric and language. What unites the varied approaches of these writers, is a commitment to creating new fields, new idioms, new vernaculars, and new forms. Key areas of conflict and concern, among the eleven poets, include genre and the nature of the lyric, connections between gender and aesthetics, and the nature of poetic language. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, Brian Teare on Martha Ronk, Michael Cross on Leslie Scalapino, Lynn Keller on Cole Swensen, Khadijah Queen on Natasha Trethewey, Lisa Russ Spaar on Jean Valentine, Julie Brown on Cecilia Vicuña, and Richard Greenfield on Rosmarie Waldrop. A companion web site will present audio of each poet's work.