Artificial Heart

by Peter Gizzi

Artificial Heart negotiates the intersection of artifice and the turbulent domain of feeling. Sampling lyric history from the troubadour tradition to post-industrial punk, it sustains the haunting quality of a song heard from a distance, overlaid with playground noise, lovers' oaths, and cries of loss.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published November 1, 1997

About the author

Educated at New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, poet Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, including Threshold Songs (2011), The Outernationale (2007), and Artificial Heart (1998).

Gizzi uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped. 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.”

(Source: Peter Gizzi @ The Poetry Foundation)

Reviews

[Heather Gibbons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous, arresting images, interesting syntax, wonderful range in terms of form, intellectually-complex without being willfully obtuse or obscure. A few quibbles: there are moments of self-awareness and ironic distance and a few other postures/gestures that seem a little dated to me, very 1990s, and I didn't care for the insistence on negation-similes (is that a term?) in several poems in the first sections of the book-- X is not like Y, B is not at all like A, and so forth. Though it seemed fresh and satisfying at first, that particular figurative device began to feel redundant and even a bit distracting when repeated. But overall, I found this collection satisfying, surprising, and thought-provoking.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hell yeah!