The Poetry Project is honored to welcome longtime friends (of the Project and each other) Peter Gizzi and John Yau to close out our regular Spring 2024 season. In their new books, Fierce Elegy and Tell it Slant, Gizzi and Yau look both forward and backward, channeling difficult truths with lyric's bright, refracted clarity.
This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Poetry Project's YouTube.
Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), Now It’s Dark (2020), and Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award (2016), all from Wesleyan. In 2020 Carcanet brought out Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems in the UK. His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018 Wesleyan brought out In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. Editing projects have included o•blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook(Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and with the late Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). He teaches poetry and poetics in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
John Yau is a poet, critic, fiction writer, publisher of Black Square Editions, and one of the founders of the online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend. His recent books of poems include Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon, 2012) and Bijoux in the Dark (Letter Machine Editions, 2018). His next book of poem, Genghis Chan on Drums is forthcoming from Omnidawn (Fall, 2021). He is the author of monographs on Thomas Nozkowski, Richard Artschwager, Jasper Johns, Catherine Murphy, A.R. Penck, and William Tillyer, as well as many catalog essays. His latest books include selections of essays, The Wild Children of William Blake (Autonomedia, 2017) and Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign (MadHat, 2020). He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Academy of American Poets, New York Foundation of the Arts, Ingram Merrill Foundation and the General Electric Foundation. He received the 2017 Jackson Award in Poetry. He is Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University) and lives in New York.