paper • 88 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-954245-50-1
eISBN: 978-1-954245-51-8
March 2023 • Poetry
So Long
Jen Levitt
Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt’s So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. “Soon,” she says, “we’ll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow.” In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt’s speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling “in their sweat-resistant fabrics,” “so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time”; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers “no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare.” It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title’s idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, “& look at how lucky I’ve been, for so long.”
“Autobiography”
Is it enough that I tried to do no harm?
I drank the milk before it spoiled,
biked to work, held doors. When I crushed
the occasional spider, I felt mostly sorry.
In the city, nature was hard to follow,
incognito in crevices along the river,
but who can tell a flower from a weed?
I met the not-knowing, & it bloomed in me
like a seed. Traffic blinked, an organism,
while I trained my mind on the mind,
which took forever. I couldn’t think my way
into the future, where love was a country
I’d never visited but wanted to. The ocean
repeated while we wandered the lemon groves.
About the Author