Threshold Songs (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
“Gizzi’s fifth collection, is his most profoundly rueful and wildly humoured work to date. This is a wintry ‘un gathering’ of poems, sung in the name of ‘Tradition & The Indivisible Talent’ – a company whose ghosts include Basil Bunting, W.S. Graham and the late R.F. Langley.”—Best Books of 2011, Times Literary Supplement“(Gizzi’s) innovation has been to treat the lyric like a big radio antenna, simultaneously transmitting and receiving eerie broadcasts from the air.” —Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker“Peter Gizzi’s poems have always walked a line between stylized opacity and friendly, if melancholy, accessibility, enacting an argument about whether language is esoteric or generic, personal or public, our salvation from commerce or hopelessly commoditized.  This argument is at the heart of much contemporary poetry, but for Gizzi it also represents an interior struggle between the need to disclose emotion with words and the need to hide it behind words. The interplay between these two ideas has never been stronger than in his new collection"—Craig Morgan Teicher, Bookforum“…he differentiates himself…by pushing his poems toward a place where the making of meaning is st ill his foremost desire, especially in this, his fifth, and most personal book.”  —Publishers Weekly