In Defense of Nothing: Peter Gizzi, Selected Poems: 1987- 2011

Gizzi's poems push against both abstraction and lyric voicing, ensnaring the close listener in an intensifying cascade of dissociative rhythms and discursive constellations. Songs also say, saying also sings. And what at first seems to resist song becomes song. These enthralling, sometime soaring, poems approach, without dwelling in, elegy. They are the soundtrack of a political and cultural moment whose echoic presence Gizzi makes as viscous as the “dark blooming surfs of winter ice."

This Trip Around the Sun Is Expensive

Shipboard is
what winter is

what isinglass
moonlit wave
winter is

Winter surf
all time booming

all time viscous air
not black, night
winter dark blooming

surfs of winter ice

No time away
from igloo ice

Winterreise
hubba hubba like

This trip
around the sun
is expensive

To work
the proud flesh

Wound bright

Shipboard is
what winter is

what isinglass
moonlit wave
winter is

Winter surf
all time booming

all time viscous air
not black, night
winter dark blooming

surfs of winter ice

from Wesleyan University Pres
40% discount on all WUP poetry titles, this one too, in April.