Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight: Poems

by Julia B. Levine

Overview

"A polished poet of extraordinary skill.... Levine is caught between wholehearted love of the world's beauty and sorrow at its unavoidable misery and suffering." -- Library Journal
With an astonishing grasp of language and detail, Julia Levine enacts a visceral, lyric experience that slips wildly between and within tragedy and grace. In Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, her fourth collection, Levine offers far-ranging subjects, including poems about a friend's suicide and the poet's own interactions with traumatized children, as well as a series of revision poems that question the imagination's infinite possibilities for creation. In "Strolling in Late April," a woman with dementia wanders in a park filled with springtime beauty, while in "Tahoe Wetlands," the speaker recalls a rape at gunpoint through the merciful distance of time.
At times humorous, ironic, and even redemptive, these poems are infused with lush images of the natural and physical world. Levine's work pries apart small places that exist within the spaces between beauty and trauma in an ordinary life. Ultimately, the poems affirm our human resilience, made possible by the presence and help of others: "carrying something of the unbearable / between us until it could be borne."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807154540
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	02/12/2014
Series:	Barataria Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Julia B. Levine is the author of three previous poetry collections: Ditch-Tender; Ask, winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry; and Practicing for Heaven, winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. She was also a recipient of the Discovery/The Nation award and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod. Her work has been widely published in journals such as The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and works and lives in Davis, California.

Table of Contents

At the Hog Island Oyster Company 1

I Ruthless Furnace

St. Augustine, Florida 5

A Week of Storms 7

Heat Wave on the Children's Unit 9

Instead of Orchids or an Elegy of Swans 10

Strolling in Late April 11

On the Dementia Floor 12

After Visiting Your Mother, We Drive to the Rifle Range 13

Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight 14

II Locomotive of the Lord

Netherland 25

Post-Surgery Narratives in Triptych 26

In One of Ten Thousand Versions 28

In Another Version, I Have a Child with God 30

In a Later Version 32

In Another Version, I Play Gin Rummy with Satan 33

All Night You Ask the Children of the World to Forgive You 35

III Magnitude

At the Zoo 39

The Viewing 40

The First Spring Since You Died 41

Now and Then 42

I Tell My Dead Father a Secret 43

Instruments of Loss and Wind 46

Letter to My Newly Widowed Mother 47

IV Risking Delight

Poem Ending with an Unanswered Question 51

Adultery 52

you tell me the end 53

Inheritance 54

In the Real Paradise 55

Menarche 56

When the Door Between Worlds Finally Opened 57

The Raccoon 59

We Sit in a Beached Rowboat 60

Leave-Taking 61

Eventually 62

V music despite everything

Tahoe Wetlands 65

Tahoe City, 1988 67

Ode to Fruit Flies 69

Songbird 70

Yes to the Youth at an Outdoor Concert 72

Garden Party as the Prow of a Small Ship Traveling 73

Variations on Rupture and Repair: Horse 75

Interlude 76

Variations on Rupture and Repair: Cottage 78

In Praise of What Remains 79

Notes 83