Features selections of poetry and prose from "Theory of Flight," "The Life of Poetry," "The Speed of Darkness," "Breaking Open," "The Gates," and other works

A Muriel Rukeyser Reader

Literature & Fiction

Levi, Jan Heller

RUKEYSER, Muriel

United States

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Winner of the 1998 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets. 
Given in Memory of Eric Mathieu King

Once I Gazed at You in Wonder: Poems

Poetry

Louisiana State Univ Pr

Alice Fulton, the judge for the 1998 Walt Whitman Award, calls Once I Gazed at You in Wonder “quite simply, the most endearing book I’ve read in some time.” Readers of this audacious and, yes, endearing collection will agree. Jan Heller Levi has said that her poems are not confessions but conversations. Here, then, are her conversations with the world. What sets Levi apart, however, is that she lets the world answer back. Difficult fathers, ineffectual mothers are forgiven; ex-lovers are blessed. Sophisticated but never jaded, this poet looks in wonder beyond the self: a cup of coffee in one of New York’s ubiquitous Greek diners can launch Levi into a meditation on truth versus compassion; a suite of elegies for her mother takes us from a hospital corridor to the studio of a television talk show where God is the guest; a poetry reading in which she shares the stage with a folk singer illustrates Levi’s gift for illuminating the absurd textures of late-twentieth-century existence.
 Don’t you have any happy poems? he wondered.
 Don’t you have any cancer songs? I asked.
 With the narrative drive of great fiction, the consolations of philosophy, and the rigor of art, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder marks the entrance of a much-needed new voice and vision in the conversation that is American poetry.

Once I Gazed at You in Wonder: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)

LSU Press

Skyspeak: Poems

In her much-anticipated second collection, Jan Heller Levi offers ardent, astonishing, individual poems in a trajectory that seems to suggest a story of one woman's life. But it's the realm of almost, the places of in-between—where rage and resignation, death and rebirth, the sayable and the unsayable, cannot be untwined—that Levi explores in the simultaneously harrowing and haunting Skyspeak. Here again are the delicious humor and the disarming directness—coupled with what Alice Fulton has called Levi's "wicked ear"—that graced her award-winning Once I Gazed at You in Wonder. Here again are poems electrically alive, "so alive," as the author writes, "it's killing me." Skyspeak is alternately tender, daring, consoling, outraged, transcendent, and down-to-earth. It earns Levi an important place among the most exciting American poets. Then one day I heard Jussi Bjoerling and Robert Merrill, in the famous duet from Bizet's Pearl Fishers, and I was done for. Each note unfolding into the next, the journey, the patience of the flute, like the breath of the body, held deep in the body, escaping, up, while those two men share the longest, saddest, extended sigh in the history of the human voice. And what are they singing about? The liner notes say a woman who threatens their friendship, which they vow to uphold. But I say they're singing life, how we're always losing something, how beautiful that is. —from "I Lost My Best Friend to Music"

In her much-anticipated second collection, Jan Heller Levi offers ardent, astonishing, individual poems in a trajectory that seems to suggest a story of one woman's life. But it's the realm of almost, the places of in-between—where rage and resignation, death and rebirth, the sayable and the unsayable, cannot be untwined—that Levi explores in the simultaneously harrowing and haunting Skyspeak. Here again are the delicious humor and the disarming directness—coupled with what Alice Fulton has called Levi's "wicked ear"—that graced her award-winning Once I Gazed at You in Wonder. Here again are poems electrically alive, "so alive," as the author writes, "it's killing me." 
Skyspeak is alternately tender, daring, consoling, outraged, transcendent, and down-to-earth. It earns Levi an important place among the most exciting American poets. 
Then one day I heard Jussi Bjoerling and Robert Merrill, in the famous duet from Bizet's Pearl Fishers, and I was done for. Each note unfolding into the next, the journey, the patience of the flute, like the breath of the body, held deep in the body, escaping, up, while those two men share the longest, saddest, extended sigh in the history of the human voice. 
And what are they singing about? The liner notes say a woman who threatens their friendship, which they vow to uphold. But I say they're singing life, how we're always losing something, how beautiful that is. —from "I Lost My Best Friend to Music"

Praise for Jan Heller Levi:"It's Levi's humanity that ultimately won't let you loose, words as direct as bullets, as kisses."Bob HolmanOrphan, Jan Heller Levi’s new collection, is an unabashed confrontation with loneliness, otherness, and abandonment. These poemsancient, immediate, serene, disgruntled, wickedly humorous, unsettlingly earnestare also daring explorations of what love is. In the new millennium, with so much loss to mournand so much more still to loseOrphan contemplates how we make our griefs our tools.”What Love IsTo forsake all others.To float the beloved on your backfrom flood to land, to wrench breadfrom the beggar's hand, snatchthe oxygen mask from a child's face.To ransack hospitals and nursing homesfor drugs to ease the beloved's pain,to stumble down 101 floors, belovedslung on your back, not stoppingfor the other ones in wheelchairswaiting at the landing doors.Jan Heller Levi's first collection of poems, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and poems from her second collection, Skyspeak, won The Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America. She is editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, served as consulting editor for the new edition of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, and is currently writing the biography of Rukeyser. She lives in New York City with her husband, the Swiss novelist and playwright Christoph Keller, and teaches at Hunter College.

Orphan

Alice James Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Levi, Jan Heller. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Levi, Jan Heller

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Levi, Jan Heller. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Muriel Rukeyser Reader

Once I Gazed at You in Wonder: Poems

Once I Gazed at You in Wonder: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)

Skyspeak: Poems

Skyspeak: Poems

Orphan