An homage to eros in new poetry collection
“I love bodily things,” writes poet Miriam Levine in her latest collection, “Forget about Sleep” (NYQ Books). That love — reverence, attraction, curiosity — is apparent in her lines and in between them. I like her attention on the male body, “the oblique muscles and swelling sex.” Elsewhere, she sees a man who looks like a Greek statue, like a figure arriving from Crete to a small town where “an old woman like me/ would say she had seen/ a god.” Of remembering a first lover, she writes, “His head is turned to the side, angling/ toward his shoulder as if he were shy being/ so dead.” The vital force of aliveness, eros, desire, pleasure (“why would/ you ever want to leave the earth?”), rub shoulder-to-shoulder with mortality, our candle quick to be blown out, or, perhaps more aptly here, all of us flowers quick to bloom and quick to fade. For Levine, the floral, the arboreal count as bodily things, too, the marigolds and roses, witch hazel, laurel, and lilacs. Sunset’s fleeting blaze carries the same force, “a long pink slit … turned/ fruity, darker, lit like wine/ held to fire.” Charged in its changing, in its total temporariness, in the great pleasure, so acute, so fast. Levine, the first poet laureate of Arlington, who lives part time in New Hampshire, honors the flesh, which is to say, the human — how lucky we are, to have senses, skin, the confusion of want, to know an “eely tongue” and the “spice of lilacs.” To be alive and feel “a stinging sweetness fill me/ with desire that had no object.” Levine will read and discuss her work on Thursday, May 16, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Brookline.
Roxbury book festival returns for a second year
The Greater Roxbury Book Festival returns for its second year on Saturday as a celebration of writers and reading, with spotlights on local writers and attention on igniting excitement about books for reluctant readers. Ibram X. Kendi will give the opening keynote at noon, discussing his writing process, his nonfiction work, and what keeps him grounded. Caldecott winner Ekua Holmes, who grew up in Roxbury, will discuss her latest picture book, “Coretta: The Autobiography of Mrs. Coretta Scott King.” Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola will lead a poetry workshop; LJ Baptiste and Jonathan Todd will lead a workshop on creating comics; Art Collins will lead a poetry workshop; poet and Roxbury native Abria Smith will discuss character creation as a tool for self-expression and trauma release; Jabari Asim, director of the creative writing MFA program at Emerson, will lead a fiction workshop; Denise Washington and Valerie Foxx will celebrate Phillis Wheatley; Carlos Hernandez and Phoebe Sinclair will talk creativity and fictional adventures; and Jacqueline Woodson, author of “Brown Girl Dreaming” which won the National Book Award, will give the closing keynote. The festival takes place May 18 from noon-5 p.m. at the Roxbury Branch of the Boston Public Library, 149 Dudley St., Boston. Admission is free.
Maine press publishes retrospective of Jean Valentine’s poetry
Jean Valentine’s poems can sometimes read like dream fragments, not the oneiric residue of the day or the dull celluloid nothings, but the flashes of insight, truth, the mystery glimpse, the haunt, the sights and senses that stick with you long after the fuzz of morning. “Do people meet again? In our same clothes?/ or light?” A new retrospective of her work, “Light Me Down,” out this week from Maine-based press Alice James Books, showcases Valentine’s ability to charge between the dreamy and unalloyed precision. “I thirst to walk with you/ neverleaving.” These are poems of snow, of the quiet, profound transformation, of moments of altering nothingness in the night. Valentine, who died in 2020, does with language what poetry is meant to do with language, which is to go beyond it. “The animals all/ go up like chimney-sweeps, Eternity,/ you, me, up on a rope like the live geese,/ chimney-sweep geese.”
Coming out
“Woodworm” by Layla Martinez, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott (Two Lines)
“Self-Esteem and the End of the World” by Luke Healy (Drawn and Quarterly)
“Tomorrowing” by Terry Bisson (Duke University)
Pick of the week
Sam Kaas of the Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, Vt., recommends “Oh!” by Mary Robison (Catapult): “Delectably pithy. Slightly deranged. Totally brilliant. I find myself regularly in awe of Mary Robison’s fiction, and this hilariously deadpan family saga is among my favorite of her novels.”