Fog Notes - Tony Leuzzi

The more I read Fog Notes, the deeper I am in its thrall. The poems are lavish with inuendo, with fog’s “rigorous, elusive grammars,” and its capacity to serve as interlocutor between grief and astonishment. They track that moment when incoherence fleetingly coheres, and locate the threshold between loss and the arrival of something unforeseen and strange, as in a poem called “Pull Toys,” in which “A spotted hare / regards the stars. / Its tufted rear // abuts a book / on semi-colons.” In important ways, Tony Leuzzi is a descendant of Wallace Stevens, with his penchant for metrical lines, his attraction to fluid poems of perception and imagination, and to a subject’s unfolding, numinous inferences. These poems, of such formal beauty and intellectual precision, also deliver that top-of-my-head-taken-off thrill of images that reach into the unfathomable, such as when two naked wrestlers “trade barbaric groans until / a timer dings and they unglue / like steaming strips of wallpaper,” or a nameless woman in a field is “a lion carcass filled with honey.” I will read and study Fog Notes for all my vaporous forevers.

—Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

2023

$18.95

Tony Leuzzi is a poet, critic, and art maker whose books of poems include Radiant Losses (New Sins 2010), The Burning Door (Tiger Bark 2014), and Meditation Archipelago (Tiger Bark 2018). Passwords Primeval (BOA Editions 2012) is a collection of interviews with 20 American poets. He has received numerous teaching accolades, including the Wesley T. Hansen Award, and was the recipient of the State University of New York’s Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creativity. An advocate of poetry and poets, he is a routine contributor to the “Books” section of The Brooklyn Rail; and his interviews and criticism have been published in Lambda Literary, SCOUT Poetry, American Literary Review, Great River Review, The Kenyon Review (Online), The Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere. Some of his reviews and interviews have been cited on the Poetry Foundation Website.