Customer Reviews

Artificial Heart

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In ARTIFICIAL HEART, Peter Gizzi, one of the most exuberantly talented poets of his generation, a poet drunk with his love of words, combines a rigorous interrogation of the act of utterance with a determination to save and renew the tropes of chivalry, to rescue both the individual beloved and the world as object of devotion. "When goodbye is the operative word/forgiveness is either easy or impossible," Gizzi writes, and it's his goal to transform that easy impossibility into the impossibly easy. "Once upon a once there was a once/and that once evaporated into air": in ARTIFICIAL HEART, Peter Gizzi conjures up that never-to-return "once" and permits us to reside there (in air) for an impossible, beautiful moment.

This is the best book since Peter Gizzi invented books. I, The Blaze knits an isthmus in this, his second full length collection. Blip, blip P GIZZA is in the house. This book is so good I almost peed my pants when I read it. I went right down pawn shop & sold all my UZIs to buy a typewriter. No joke, yo. I wish Peter Gizzi were my uncle.

This book blew my mind. If you like great modern poetry, Stevens, Williams, Oppen, etc., check this out. Especially long poems like "Ding Repair" and "Pierced." This is a smart lyric poetry that has the urgency of a broadcast from the end of the world, with all of history behind it. It's got great music all the way through. Gizzi rocks!

This volume of poetry ensconces Peter Gizzi's best and rawest work; but even at his strongest, this book is a bearer of an exhausted overwrought poetics of abstraction, an energetic but corrosive alchemy of nine-parts surreal to one-parts romantic confessional, an echo of a prodigious past greatness, weaker than any seminal NY poet's material by a hundredfold. His cannonization into the NY school and the reverence he receives from these same poets is mystifying; it's like they have no self-respect. To be more specific about my arguably unfair and cold-hearted criticism, Gizzi's book has no stylistic integrity. Every poem seems like a failed experiment of some kind: some are like tortured and formless paintings that just sit on the page and grow mold as you read, others are more like vapid ballads injected with speed or snowball or some such artificial stimulant to make it seem like they're moving along with the melodies stuck together. This pattern of shifting forms interrupts the flow of one poem experience to the next - maybe for a smarmy MFA "pat on the back" chapbook this would be alright, but for a full length book, uh uh. Some of his jarring landscapes are quite cool, and his wordplay is virtuosic, but the words are like bits of dust in a vaccuum - he just doesn't make the human connection with my core. [...]