V. Penelope Pelizzon
V. Penelope Pelizzon’s A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye (Pitt Poetry Series), longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a TLS Book of the Year and one of LitHub “Favorite Poetry Collections” of 2024. Her first book, Nostos, won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award; her second, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time, was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize at The Waywiser Press. She is also coauthor of Tabloid, Inc., a critical study of film, photography, and crime narratives. Her recognitions include a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Award. She is a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. https://vpenelopepelizzon.com/
Whose Flesh is Flame,
Whose Bone is Time
by V. Penelope Pelizzon
Pub: Apr. 3, 2014
Finalist - 8th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
From the coal country of Western Pennsylvania, to Camorra-ridden Naples, to the streets of Damascus before the outbreak of civil war, the lyric poems in this outstanding collection chart the complexities of national and intimate identity. By turns playful, lamenting, sceptical, bawdy, and aggrieved, they find the human fingerprint below history's erasures, ultimately praising the endurance of the soul "so ample that, if that is all there is,/ she makes a feast of thorns."
What People Are Saying
“Pelizzon’s poetry is acquiring a reputation. Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals (the Kenyon Review, Nation, Southern Review, and FIELD); her first book, Nostos, won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; she’s recently received a Lannan Foundation fellowship and an Amy Lowell traveling scholarship; and her second collection, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time, was published in the spring of 2014. Her work, however, has not been the subject of detailed commentary, and the appearance of a particularly striking poem, ‘Nulla Dies Sine Linea’ in Whose Flesh Is Flame, presents an opportunity to rectify this deficiency and introduce her writing to a wider audience. Like much of her work, this poem is unshowy, nimble, personal, and expertly crafted. It is lightly constructed, yet the autumnal moment of insight it embodies has considerable emotional impact; it deftly mixes Apollonian reflection with the imagistic logic of dreams, and it is unself-consciously informal while drawing deep on traditional forms and techniques. Above all, its powers of implication and suggestion give rise to a series of harmonics or overtones that enrich the spare textures on the page.
– M. W. Rowe, Philosophy and Literature, 40:1, April 2016
To read the whole of this article, please click on Read Full Review
Excerpts
Nulla Dies Sine Linea
On my birthday
A crow guffaws, dirty man throwing the punch of his
One joke. And now, nearer, a murder
Answers, chortling from the pale hill’s brow.
From under my lashes’ wings they stretch
Clawed feet. There the unflappable years
Perch and stare. When I squint, when I
Grin, my new old face nearly hops
Off my old new face. Considering what’s flown,
What might yet fly, I lean my chin
On the palm where my half-cashed fortune lies.
The Waywiser Press
Fluency
Syria, 2009
Just returned from six months in the States,
Blinded by the burning screens of Google and Tweet
To body language on the street, I’m slow to understand the girl
Pointing at heaven, then at her ear and mouth,
Telling me God made her deaf and mute.
Shrewdly her bronze gaze appraises me.
I gesture at her stand and shrug. She flashes ten
Fingers, then ten again, showing what the lemons cost.
I nod. She bags a kilo, pinching her veil
Between her lips to cover her tattooed chin.
From my pocket I dredge a clutch of brassy coins.
Without taking her eyes off mine, she counts out twenty
Then shuts her hand quickly, making a cutting motion
Once to say halas, that’s enough.
Veil wrinkling in her teeth, she grins at me.
Before universities, before
Embassies, the souk. Some palm-smoothed truth,
Warmed in this back and forth, will outlast all the information
I’ve spent a half year circulating.
I weigh my words here, learning what they’re worth.
The Waywiser Press