ARTIFICIAL HEART by Peter Gizzi (SIGNED by Gizzi)

Burning Deck, 1998, First limited edition of 50 signed and numbered copies, 96 pp., 6 1/4" X 8 3/4", Softcover

Near Fine (SIGNED)

Gizzi's Artificial Heart negotiates the intersection of artifice and the turbulent domain of feeling. The book recuperates the concerns of the 11th-century troubadour poets—the hermetic display of love, politics, statehood, and grief— in the present. Formally the collection is a sampling of lyric history from the troubadours to post-industrial punk: it sustains the haunting quality of a song heard from a distance, overlayed with playground noise, lovers’ oaths and cries of loss. The poems both celebrate and challenge the spell of the physical world over the imagination, narrating the gap between embrace and abandonment.

One of 50 signed and numbered copies. (This being #44/50)