“Fog Notes”

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

“The Burning Door”

The poems in The Burning Door are part fairy tale, part fable--and, then again, partly a sort of pause before the illusions that beguile us...in his poetry necessary departures have nothing to do with return. Rather they usher us into an instance of entrance that is equally a spell cast upon us. Thus entranced, we discover that this witty and enigmatic book blossoms into a generosity of perception, which dissolves lesser magic to unite us in 'an instance as thin and precise as a needle.' - Elizabeth Robinson

“Meditation Archipelago”

Inventive, ambitious, nimble, quick-witted, Tony Leuzzi’s Meditation Archipelago amasses poems of technical virtuosity and capacious insight. An alert, original personality is at work in this collection as subterranean vaults of feeling are excavated and reclaimed. And who doesn’t need to be reminded of Leuzzi’s comically useful wisdom: ‘No one wants to be a bag of damp / waffles dragged through the valley of time'? It’s a joy to have one’s perceptions refreshed by these wickedly intelligent poems.’ - Lee Upton

“Passwords Primeval”

Passwords Primeval sets aside the artificial boundaries of poetry "schools" and "movements" to cut to the art of the matter. Tony Leuzzi's astounding knowledge of poetry draws new insights from such luminaries as Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirshfield, Patricia Smith, and Martín Espada. These new interviews provide insights into the poets and their poems without compromising any of their mystery. Whether you're looking for deeper understanding of your favorite poets or are simply interested in the lives of contemporary artists, Passwords Primeval reveals the interconnectedness of these masters whose voices echo each other from opposite ends of the same canyon.

“Radiant Losses”

Everything Tony Leuzzi puts his hand to has a bit of magic to it, and Radiant Losses is no exception. When a statue breaks into pieces an aesthetic hunger embroils the community: birds perch upon the marble hair in the garden; in a cocktail bar gay men gaze upon the archaic torso of Apollo and 'dream/the perfect head for it.' It is not only the sumptuousness of his dreams that commends Leuzzi's poetry to us, but the rigor and starch of his language. The Fibonacci-based work in the center of Losses is a model for making the formal do your bidding, rather than the other way round. Something about the constraints of this work has released in him a concomitant flowering, like the greenhouse orchids at the beginning of Chandler's The Big Sleep. One syllable, then a second, add up to a line of two, a fourth line of three, a fifth line of two plus three: in the hands of someone with less skill and heart, this would prove a recipe for numbness. Instead a grand fountain shoots colored jets into the stars. - Kevin Killian.