Now It's Dark

Starred review from October 19, 2020
The powerful eighth book from Gizzi (The Archeophonics) reckons with a sense of futility. The first of four sections, “Lyric,” makes up more than half of the book, its short lines appearing to float on the page. In the opening poem, “Speech Acts for a Dying World,” the speaker declares that he is “done/ with the poem as a vehicle/ to understand violence,” though Gizzi’s writing often seeks sense in disorder. In the second section, “Garland,” Gizzi repeats words and phrases (“on the stoop,” “ongoing,” “Euclid sings,” and “smeared gold”) in the last lines of poems, which become the first words of the next poem, forming a kind of garland. The third section, “Nocturne,” includes a nine-part prose poem, “Ship of State,” which considers mortality and time’s passage: “a local boneyard sleeping time away... the open landscape we face together.” In the last section, “Coda,” the speaker admits “A particular blur/ attended my mind/ from end to end.// These feelings/ of futurelessness.” The ethereal yet confident poems in this book deliver their satisfying reckoning without a hint of sentimentality.