Should the two archetypal masks that represent Comedy and Tragedy pass through each other (imagine a total eclipse), might not their overlapping intersection be an expression of deadpan? And what about Janus, that janitor in January? Do his back-to-back facial characteristics suggest anything more than the infinite, noncommittal gaze of beginnings and endings? Or does the almost reckless declarativeness of these poems show a mind’s weathering both the antic and the intimate, both merriment and distress?

Recent books by Michael Gizzi are My Terza Rima, No Both, Interferon (The Figures) Cured in the Going Bebop (Paradigm) and Continental Harmony (Roof Books). He has edited lingo magazine as well as Hard Presss and, with Craig Watson, Qua Books. He is currently teaching at Roger Williams University.

“Razor sharp but also rich and generously compelling, Michael Gizzi's poetry lambastes as it celebrates”
—John Ashbery [on No Both]

“No American poet I know gives the American language the workout Michael Gizzi does and no word escapes his notice…”
—William Corbett

 “Never one to have enough of anything, de Kooning once said,You put in everything you can and then you're done. You might shrug some off but not finally include more in. Until the next time, and each of these poems is that next time. Length doesn't matter, they are denser than they look. He has even found a way to record some forgotten strains. You get a chance at them only because they lie abandoned here. But asMonk said, It's up to you to pick it up. I wonder at them as I wonder at my own. Who wants to be cured of desire?”
—Clark Coolidge

“What if there is nothing special/ about this particular moment,” asks Gizzi in this 15th collection, which, indeed, gathers together surreal fragments of the everyday to show the kind of world that could only appear in poems. Gizzi, a well-respected experimental poet in his own right, is the elder brother of poet and Nation poetry editor Peter Gizzi. As the title suggests, these poems are deeply deadpan. Poems in prose paragraphs and short stanzas pile up clever, grim and ironic statements to describe surreal places or states of mind. While the poems rarely render a narrative, their emotions are crystal clear, as in this description of a common adult longing for the past: “I must spend a night under the enormous rock I associate with childhood.” Elsewhere, what seems like nonsense turns out to be common sense: “A popular corrective to self-focusing/ would be love.”
--Publishers Weekly (May 18, 09)

“Someday there is going to be a big edition of the collected poems of Michael Gizzi & readers are going to gasp at the size, scope & quality of all that he has been doing now for more than 35 years… New Depths of Deadpanis going to stand out just possibly as the very pinnacle of his work. It’s a great book, period. Its genius is not just the degree to which Gizzi can make great complexity appear breath-takingly simple, but rather the great sense of humanity in whose service he does this...
The New York School has often been treated as if it were flip….But there has also been a David Shapiro, Jim Carroll or Joe Ceravolo who have no trouble showing you their scars (and sometimes your own). Gizzi feels to me like part of this latter group, yet his penchant for tight, well-polished verse suggests that he insists that his poems must be fabulous as well. The amalgam is unique. There is nothing quite like these poems”
—Ron Silliman, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/blog

“Gizzi always shows himself a maestro at playing locally generated lexical tensions…. The knack for surrealistic assemblage, the intricate orchestration of sonic patterns, the unerring ear…establish [him] as a soloist of the first order.—Publishers Weekly [on My Terza Rima]