Judging committee chair Mimi Khalvati hailed the collection as "a work that is infinitely sad yet resolute, and so fully alive in body and spirit." "Written in the afterlife of grief," she continues, "Fierce Elegy brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty." Gizzi was announced as one of ten finalists last October, chosen from 187 submitted collections evaluated by judges Khalvati, Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan.
Dr. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, a divisional dean Dean at Gizzi's home institution, UMass Amherst, noted that:
The UMass College of Fine Arts and Humanities joins the poetry world in celebrating Prof. Peter Gizzi’s T.S. Eliot Prize. Prof. Gizzi’s poems explore the imagination and the self. They examine love and grief and wrestle with despair, opening for the listener a way into our joys, our sorrows, and our songs of self. We are thrilled to have Prof. Gizzi teaching in the MFA and English department and to offer so many emerging writers the opportunity to work with and learn from him.
You can listen to Gizzi read from Fierce Elegy on his PennSound author page as part of his 2023 visit to Boise State University, one of nearly two dozen recordings spanning more than thirty years housed there.
