A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye: Poems [Paperback]

Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents,A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eyemaps 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. "This collection has much in common with the perennial gardens with which it begins and ends, its beauty the sort that opens outward and proliferates, sowing itself. echoing across years."
—Plume"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“‘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 ofRepast: Tea, Lunch, Cocktails“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 tl“Ž