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So Long: Poems (Stahlecker Selections) - Tapa blanda

Levitt, Jen

 
9781954245501: So Long: Poems (Stahlecker Selections)

Sinopsis

Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt's So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. "Soon," she says, "we'll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow." In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt's speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling "in their sweat-resistant fabrics," "so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time"; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers "no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare." It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title's idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, "& look at how lucky I've been, for so long."

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Acerca del autor

Jen Levitt is the author of The Off-Season (Four Way Books, 2016). Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Boston Review, Tin House, The Yale Review and elsewhere. She lives in New York City and teaches high school students.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

Autobiography

Is it enough that I tried to do no harm?
I drank the milk before it spoiled,

biked to work, held doors. When I crushed
the occasional spider, I felt mostly sorry.

In the city, nature was hard to follow,
incognito in crevices along the river,

but who can tell a flower from a weed?
I met the not-knowing, & it bloomed in me

like a seed. Traffic blinked, an organism,
while I trained my mind on the mind,

which took forever. I couldn’t think my way
into the future, where love was a country

I’d never visited but wanted to. The ocean
repeated while we wandered the lemon groves.

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