BY KAREN BOSSICK
Award-winning poet Peter Gizzi will offer a reading of his work at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 12, at The Community Library in Ketchum.
Gizzi, the author of 10 books of poetry and winner of the prestigious 2025 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, is visiting as part of a collaboration with the Boise State University MFA in creative writing program. He’ll conduct two days of workshops with the MFA students at the historic Ernest and Mary Hemingway House owned by the Library, where he’ll also stay as a short-term writer-in-residence in the property’s residency apartment.
Gizzi was influenced by Ezra Pound, the Beat Poets and John Ashbery. He uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped.
His first-full-length collection, “Periplum.” won praise from critics. “Artificial Heart” cemented his reputation as a lyric poet.
Reflecting on the question of whether his work is narrative or lyric, Gizzi stated in an interview with Poetry Daily, “I think I am a narrative poet—I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen.”
In the same interview he spoke of his desire “to compose just at the boundaries of the known—to find a way to write at the edge of an already impacted history and world which is where we always already are at all times.”
His recent books include "Fierce Elegy" (Wesleyan, 2023), "Now It's Dark" (Wesleyan, 2020), and "Archeophonics" (Wesleyan, 2016). In 2020 Carcanet published "Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems" in the UK.
He has been on the faculty of Brown University, UC Santa Cruz, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa, The Writer’s Workshop at The University of Iowa, and Cambridge University. He currently teaches poetry and poetics in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Gizzi will also speak at BSU on Friday, March 13 at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Hemingway Center Reading Series. Both events in Ketchum and Boise are free and open to the public.
RSVP for The Community Library presentation at https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/15185364.