The Outernationale (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Peter Gizzi (Author)

Book Description

Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series | Publication Date: February 12, 2007

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection fuses documentary truth with imaginative force. The Outernationale locates us "just off the grid," in an emotional and spiritual frontier, where reverie, outrage, history, and vision merge. Thinking and feeling become one in the urgent music of Gizzi's poems. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom. This is both a poetry of conscience and the embodiment of a genuinely poetic consciousness. Objects, images, and their histories are caught here in their half-life, their profoundly human after-life. Gizzi has written a brilliant follow-up to Some Values of Landscape and Weather, a book hailed by Robert Creeley as "a breakthrough book in every way: for reader, for writer, and for the art."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Gizzi has been a rising star in contemporary poetry for more than a decade. With his ambitious fourth collection, he cements his status as a poet-to-watch and a bridge between challenging experimental writing, "language" poetry and accessible mainstream verse. Extending the associative, disjunctive and at times flippant aesthetics of New York School poets like Ashbery, O'Hara and Berrigan, and adding an emotional clarity all his own, Gizzi writes movingly about love ("It is so easy now to see gravity at work in your face/ Easy to understand time, that dark process,/ To accept it as a beautiful process, your face"), contemporary ennui ("We went to the store and why not") and the decline of America ("If our loves are anointed with missiles/ Apache fire, Tomahawks/ did we follow the tablets the pilgrims suggested") as well as its subtle wonders ("everywhere in the day lost in sun"). Most impressive are a series of long pieces, including two poems titled "The Outernationale" and the extraordinary "A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me." In poems, often cast in couplets, that are by turns mournful, exalting and humorous, Gizzi (Some Values of Landscape and Weather) evokes a world perceived from too many angles to merely make straight sense. (Feb.)
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Review

"Among the many things that strike me about (his) language, perhaps the first is how forthright and openhearted it is. Odd, perhaps, to say about writing that's also mysterious, but those two adjectives, along with 'brave' and 'sensuous' sum up my feelings for The Outernationale."--Richard Silsberg, Poetry Flash

"Peter Gizzi's The Outernationale is magnificent. It gives me what I need from poetry--a reminder to feel alive.... He remembers that a shiver of sensation is vital, it's the first thing, before mere message or artful phrasing."--Ange Mlinko, Harriet, Poetry Foundation blog

"The Outernationale is a remarkable book: in poem after poem, nerve flares into shimmering gauze."--John Palattella, Boston Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 132 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (February 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819567361
• ISBN-13: 978-0819567369
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,118,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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