Books
This is a striking collection, from its poems of memory and personal loss to its odes to friendship and the natural world. The blindness poems, in particular, are so metaphoric, magical, and mesmerizing. It’s like being underwater or driving fast beside a forest of tessellating trees, a confusion of green and trunks clacking by like railroad tracks. Read on and be both lifted and saddened, read on and be dazzled.
—Dorianne Laux
The speaker in Ordinary Psalms is heightened to her world of sensation even as she is losing her sight. The book never quails here, nor does it dwell. Julia B. Levine celebrates and meditates upon the simple wealth of her surroundings—the natural environment, flora, wildlife, her home, her loves, her trepidations, and her delights. These psalms rise in a single voice, but they also manifest a collective yearning to be heard. In this marvelous book, Levine succeeds in singing for us all.
—Frank X. Gaspar
Winner of the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry
Early in Julia Levine's Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, we are told, "in his Confessions, Saint Augustine wrote that the soul is a house/ too small for God to enter, though it can be enlarged, remade.' The subjects in these poems—children given the most brutal of beginnings, conjoined twins separated at the cost of one life, the last blue whale, the child whose completeness is not yet 'torn by time', the rape victim struggling to heal—reverberate with large questions: Can two bodies share one soul? Can one soul share two bodies? Does the soul fight death? 'What if there is no death, only moments looking elsewhere?' Finely honed and meticulously observed, these grounded poems circle around the biggest mystery of struggle—that it can enlarge the soul. This is a powerful book.
—Jane Mead
One of the most seductive books of poetry I have read in a very long time. Levine's poems sing in a voice that echoes that of the Divine, lifting us from multiple disasters to multiple kinds of redemptions. Her poems of witness act as healing balms for wounds one might have imagined never having the courage to speak. Bravo.
—Sheryl St. Germain
Abetted by her considerable descriptive powers and unfettered immersion in both natural and domestic worlds, Julia Levine's achievement in her vivid and compelling third book, Ditch-tender, is how consistently her sensuously distilled, keenly observed landscapes become truth-carrying, revealing self-portraits,
—Cyrus Cassells
A book of longing and healings. Julia Levine doesn't conjure as much as coax the magic to happen by itself. The poems lift and move us in currents——shifts, insinuations, and splendid runs, delicate textures, depths. —Dennis Schmitz
Winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize in Poetry
This is a stunning book, intimate with tragedy, rich with hard-earned affirmations. Worlds are laid bare, people do terrible things to one another, and the poet's gaze takes in every kind of shattering. Yet there is also vast tenderness here, redemptive lust, and encompassing rapture— as well as the kind of holy, elemental vision which transforms. Time and time again, Levine's extraordinary sensitivity to the moment—and to language— renders me speechless in awe and agreement.
—Ruth Schwartz
I am moved by Julia Levine's singing. These poems are about the tenderness that's beneath everything, even the horror. Levine writes with a full heart and I am grateful to such a true talent as hers."
—Anne Marie Macari
Winner of the 1989 Robert Danai-Anhinga Prize in Poetry
It's no exaggeration to say that reading Julia Levine's splended first book, Practicing for Heaven, produces the illusion of living the life it depicts. Her image-rich, sensuous language combined with an unflinching faith in the power of specific detail creates meaning viscerally rather than intellectually. Hers is a delicate, elegaic, and truthful poetry with rare transcendental moments that the most cynical of readers can trust—moments that, surprisingly, often evolve not from the world Levine so gloriously observes, but rather in spite of it.
—Enid Shomer 1998 Judge
A lifetime of reading poetry tends to settle some of us more and more comfortably into those 'ore-loaded rifts' of a few masters—Dickinson, Horace, Keats, whomever. It takes a compelling new presence to return our attention to the plenitude of our own moment's efforts. Again and again, I find this presence in the poetry of Julia Levine. More consistently than I could have imagined, her poems brim with a new and multi-faceted intelligence. I return to my own life hungry for more, wonderfully disturbed.
—Arthur Smith