T.S. Eliot Prize 2024 Winner Peter Gizzi on Fierce Elegy

Peter Gizzi on Fierce Elegy

The legendary American poet, essayist, and 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry Winner Peter Gizzi visits the shop to share his powerful new collection, which reckons with the transformative power of elegy through poems of lament and love.

In Fierce Elegy, Peter Gizzi contends with a decade of grief, and learns to transform a broken heart into new strength. These are poems of loss; of love; of the strangeness of being a self amid the fury of the world; and of our ongoing closeness with the dead. They are soaring yet grounded, vulnerable and brave. Ears attuned, grip assured. Mind free.

Peter Gizzi is the author of many collections of poetry including Now It's Dark (2020), Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award (2016), Threshold Songs (2011), and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011 (2014). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. Marjorie Perloff has called him 'a master of the mot juste'; Robert Creeley, 'one of the most exceptional poets of his generation'. Adrienne Rich has said 'his disturbing lyricism is like no other'; and John Ashbery thought him 'the most exciting new poet to come along in quite a while'. He lives in Holyoke, MA.