The Off-Season was a finalist for the 2017 Golden Crown Literary Society Award in Poetry.
The Off-Season
Jen Levitt
The poems in The Off-Season are populated with things—‘90s TV shows, mix-tapes, crosstown buses, winter
beaches—signifiers that trace a trajectory from girlhood to adulthood and bring to the surface feelings and
desires that ordinarily stay hidden. We witness the strangeness of modern life, relive our own adolescent
awkwardness and listen in on conversations with dead poets, TV characters, family members and intimates.
With humor, fierceness and generosity, The Off-Season grapples with the question of how to be in the world.
from "Sometimes, Gender," from The Off-Season: ...I wanted to be popular, then smart, then someone’s favorite, instead got a laptop & back-page editorial in the yearbook. I wrote Action is impractical if the war is faceless. I had a crush on every girl who smoked in the gymnasium basement. At night every star looked like a pearl, but close up each one was faithless, close up my body ruthless. I cried when my best friend got a real boyfriend, the water polo captain. Sex was temporary, tenuous. Our tenth- grade history teacher—we called him Heath— was born Heather. We didn’t know until later. Imperceptible the difference between phenotype & Photoshop, pronouns & antecedents, my body, its fixed uses.