"Upon one occasion, while engaged upon a seven-foot mirror, he did not remove his hands from it for 16 hours together." -from Caroline Herschel's obituary
Bookshop The powerful eighth book from Gizzi (
The Archeophonics) reckons with a sense of futility. The first of four sections, âLyric,â makes up more than half of the book, its short lines appearing to float on the page. In the opening poem, âSpeech Acts for a Dying World,â the speaker declares that he is âdone/ with the poem as a vehicle/ to understand violence,â though Gizziâs writing often seeks sense in disorder. In the second section, âGarland,â Gizzi repeats words and phrases (âon the stoop,â âongoing,â âEuclid sings,â and âsmeared goldâ) in the last lines of poems, which become the first words of the next poem, forming a kind of garland. The third section, âNocturne,â includes a nine-part prose poem, âShip of State,â which considers mortality and timeâs passage: âa local boneyard sleeping time away. the open landscape we face together.â In the last s