# Fierce Elegy

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/peter-gizzi/fierce-elegy

![Fierce Elegy](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/peter-gizzi/fierce-elegy_978-18-0206-524-4-2b76d6f0.jpg?v=2026-09-22%2004%3A46%3A11)

- Authors: [Peter Gizzi](https://www.bookquiver.com/peter-gizzi)
- Language: en_GB
- Published: 2024-07-04

## Description

In March 2021, Peter Gizzi was diagnosed with a very rare blood disease. This book is what followed: composed slowly and painstakingly, though for Gizzi with unprecedented speed; written with an eye as much to his own impending mortality as to a decade of losses of friends and family, yet suffused, beautifully, with music and light. The book’s broad subject is elegy, which Gizzi calls ‘a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.’ Here, ferocity is reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth. Joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. And then, as we read, it is as if we have left our bodies, are looking down on them from above, and find – as Rae Armantrout has put it in an appreciation of this book – that ‘everything is fine, better than fine.’ In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament, but also – as it has been for centuries – a work of openness, and a work of love. ‘Gizzi’s best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive for… He identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen’ The New Yorker

## Editions

### Fierce Elegy

- Publisher: Penguin
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-18-0206-523-7
- Published: 2024-07-04
- Language: en_GB

### Fierce Elegy

- Publisher: Penguin
- ISBN: 978-18-0206-524-4
- Pages: 80
- Published: 2024-07-04
- Language: en_GB