Sign-In
Cart
Orphan
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9781938584039
Publisher: Alice James Books
Published: Jan 21 2014
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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 Holman
Orphan, Jan Heller Levi's new collection, is an unabashed confrontation with loneliness, otherness, and abandonment. These poems--ancient, immediate, serene, disgruntled, wickedly humorous, unsettlingly earnest--are also daring explorations of what love is. In the new millennium, with so much loss to mourn--and so much more still to lose--Orphan contemplates how we make our griefs our tools.
What Love Is
To forsake all others.
To float the beloved on your back
from flood to land, to wrench bread
from the beggar's hand, snatch
the oxygen mask from a child's face.
To ransack hospitals and nursing homes
for drugs to ease the beloved's pain,
to stumble down 101 floors, beloved
slung on your back, not stopping
for the other ones in wheelchairs
waiting 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.
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Lao Tzu
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Paperback
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback