Peter Gizzi's Threshold Songs

Wesleyan University Press, 2011

from the publisher: The voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body’s chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken.

my commnetary:
Threshold Songs
, as the title suggests, pushes 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.’