The Holloway Series in Poetry

RACHEL LEVITSKY
Avant-Garde poetry that manages to be smart, funny and "committed to social and spiritual change."
With Gillian Osborne

Thursday
November 15th
6:30pm
The Maude Fife Room


Q&A Session to Follow

* Read a sample of her work here
*Download an event flyer here

Rachel Levitsky’s first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly (a+bend, 1999), Dearly 356, Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The Adventures of Yaya and Grace (PotesPoets, 1999) and 2(1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998). Levitsky also writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. Levitsky’s work has been published in magazines such as Sentence, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Global City, The Hat, Skanky Possum, Lungfull! and in the anthology, 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology. She founded Belladonna--an event and publication series for avant-garde poetics in August 1999. A past fellow of The McDowell Colony and Lower Manhattan Community Council, she teaches at Pratt Institute and lives steps away from The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

To step into the changeable, gleeful poetic architecture of Rachel Levitsky's book Under the Sun is to step into a space in which the boundaries between and among human beings are in a a constant state of change. Levitsky wants to connect an increasingly fragmented society, and "words are the politically charged material of exchange that occasions her desire" (Dale Smith, Jacket). The resulting poems are quick-witted, philosophically rigorous and visually surprising. Perhaps most interesting of all is that the fact that though the poems do make palpable the poet's desire for "social transformation," they also reveal what can only be described as tenderness for the very confused and inadquate social structures she interrogates. Revision, in these poems, is a kind of love.