So Long
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The elegiac and powerful second collection from Levitt (The Off-Season) is a masterwork of quiet examination, looking closely at tender and difficult moments: "shrinking life to a thumb, stone on a beach,/ mollusk, molecule, wringing the life from my life." Levitt explores her own flaws with a transparent, crisp language that balances longing with her own sense of awe towards the natural world and the intimate scenes of her home: "A father double-knots his daughter's laces on the crosstown bus, I eat an apple I picked myself with a balanced ratio of sweet to tart." The core of the collection focuses on Levitt's relationship with her father as he struggles with and ultimately succumbs to cancer: "Soon, we'll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight/ makes the river glow, & look at how lucky I've been, for so long." Levitt captures the bewildering dichotomy between the mundane and the precious as she chronicles her father's life, moving from memory to watching "an hour of bad TV in the hospital room" before taking a cab home, considering, "in that non-place what does time sound like." Levitt anticipates loss before it occurs, and this heightens how she moves through the world. The fierce honesty here inspires the reader to consider the world's temporality and treasure its moments. (Mar.)
