Fierce Elegy

Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi is a powerful new collection that delves into the transformative power of elegy, exploring themes of lament and love. This poignant work arose in the wake of Gizzi’s diagnosis with a very rare blood disease in March 2021. Composed with both deliberation and unprecedented speed, the book navigates the poet’s reflections on his own impending mortality, as well as a decade marked by the losses of friends and family. Throughout, the poems are beautifully suffused with music and light.

The broad subject of the book is elegy, which Gizzi describes as "a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world." In this collection, ferocity is reimagined as vulnerability, bravery, and discovery—a weaving together of emotional and otherworldly depth. Joy and sorrow form a complex ecosystem, allowing readers to transcend their physical selves. As Rae Armantrout noted in her appreciation of the book, it is as if everything is "fine, better than fine." In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy, while rooted in lament, is also—and has been for centuries—a work of openness and love.

"Gizzi's best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive for... He identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen," remarked The New Yorker.