A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye

Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye maps the cultural legacies we cherish against those we reject. Playful and wrenching by turns, with lines inflected by the spoken music of their Arabic, Oshiwambo, Xhosa, and Italian contexts, these profound poems explore a life where displacement is the norm. From choosing not to have children to wrestling with a left-hand stick shift in Johannesburg traffic to braising a camel loin for friends in Damascus, V. Penelope Pelizzon’s poems transport us into unexpected depths of feeling with language that is scintillant, luxurious, and wise.

More Praise

V. Penelope Pelizzon’s magnificent poems are epyllions, ‘little epics,’ that synthesize a stunning breadth of experience. Their geographical circuit—from Brooklyn to Africa to the Middle East—provides the backdrop for candid meditations on time and mortality, agency and accident. Like Elizabeth Bishop, that other consummate traveler, Pelizzon riffs on ‘assurance / of ruin’s recurrence’: Awful but cheerful.

Ange Mlinko, author of Distant Mandate

Pelizzon’s virtuosity underpins a collection that is urgent and elegiac, hilarious and harrowing, its detours into memory as vividly realized as the author’s obvious joy in literature and life.

Ned Balbo, Literary Matters

This is a brilliant book. I love its variety of forms and music, its humor and intellectual seriousness (how often does one actually learn things from poems?), its high-spirited embrace of life. This is a book I will keep close over the years.

Christian Wiman, author of Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair

Elegies, romances, eco grief, comedies, recipes, histories, and keen instruction: these poems hold the world in their lines. V. Penelope Pelizzon is a poet like no other, straddling centuries and continents with every brilliant line.

Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade

Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, V. Penelope Pelizzon is a part of all that she has met. With inexhaustible interest in the world and in the Aristotelian activity of living, she is a permanent student of people and other complex systems—cultures and landscapes, nations, economies, and empires, families, a garden, her dog, herself—and of how they are conceived, brought to term, nurtured, and mourned for. Pelizzon has the impartial eye of a naturalist and the pliant mind of a philosophical pragmatist but venerates words and word sounds and the figurative imagination like a true neo-Romantic. The result is an original, perspective-altering poetic sensibility that can be devastating, funny, hopeful, absurd, or attuned to the surprising harmonies of real experience.

Joshua Mehigan, author of Accepting the Disaster

‘What a curator the mind is,’ writes Pelizzon of her ‘scrappy cabinets of curiosities,’ these poems that feel inlaid with acacia, ivory, and swarms of silver bees and wrapped in rarest silks, redolent of spice and tea and good old human sweat. I dazzled at the music and utter brilliance of this collection.

D. A. Powell, author of Repast: Tea, Lunch, Cocktails

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