Peter Gizzi is the author of seven collections of poetry including Threshold Songs and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011, and The Outernationale. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into numerous languages. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Gizzi was nominated for the National Book Award in poetry for Archeophonics (Wesleyan University Press), his first collection of new work in five years. Archeophonics, defined as the archeology of lost sound, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one’s emotional memory. Archeophonics is a series of discrete poems that are linked by repeated phrases and words, and its themes and nothing less than joy, outrage, loss, transhistorical thought, and day-to-day life. It is a private book of public and civic concerns.