102 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Death, Grief, Loss | Poetry / Women Authors
Struggling to accept her impending blindness, the speaker in Julia B. Levine’s fifth collection of poetry, Ordinary Psalms, asks everyday life to help her learn how to see beyond appearances into fundamental truths.
As she contemplates the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide, along with her own visual impairment, Levine holds the world “close as I needed / to see.” Imagistic, lyrical, and at times imploring divine intervention from a god she does not know or trust, these poems curse and praise the extraordinary place we live in and are in danger of losing. Lamenting that “this world is a mortal affliction / with wounds in the beautiful,” Ordinary Psalms provides a seductive and lyric rumination on radiance, loss, and grief.
Julia B. Levine is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, winner of the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. She is 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 Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and the Southern Review. She lives and works in Davis, California.
“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
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