Join the Forbes Library in Northampton for a special National Poetry Month event with Peter Gizzi! Peter will read from his acclaimed collection, Fierce Elegy, which won the 2024 Mass Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Fierce Elegy reminds us that the elegy is lament but also—as it has been for centuries—a work of love. For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, "a holding open." In Gizzi's voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. 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 love. "This new poetry," Kamau Brathwaite has written about Gizzi, "taking such care of temperature—the time & details of the world—meaning the space(s) in which we live—defining love in this way. Writing along the edge. A way of writing about hope."

This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

PETER GIZZI is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently, FIERCE ELEGY (2023), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award ; NOW IT’S DARK (2020), a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award; and ARCHEOPHONICS (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation. He has twice been the recipient of The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018 Wesleyan University Press published IN THE AIR: ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF PETER GIZZI. He is currently a Senior Global Fellow in Poetry at the University of St. Andrews. He teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.