Ask: Poems - Hardcover

Levine, Julia B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1879852942 ISBN 13: 9781879852945

Publisher: Univ of Tampa, 2003

Synopsis

Ask attempts to grapple with questions of beauty, loss, damage, and redemption in the context of multiple landscapes, including the environments of abused and neglected children placed in temporary foster care, the wilderness of the Northern California cast line, and the geography of the poet's own memory. With an on-going clinical practice, Julia Levine is able to draw from her own experiences as a child psychologist, a mother of three, and a daughter, in order to bring to light some of the more disturbing aspects of how our culture enacts love and desire. Ultimately, however, Ask is a volume of poetry, posing far more questions than it answers.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Winner of the 2003 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry

Even as a special-order item, the Univeristy of Tampa Press usually ships out Ask within 1-2 business days of receipt of order.

From the Back Cover:

"This is a stunning book, intimate with tragedy, rich with hard-earned affirmation. Worlds are laid bare, people do terrible things to one another, and the poet's gaze takes in every kind of shattering. Yet there is also a vast tenderness here, redemptive lust and encompassing rapture-as well as the kind of holy, elemental vision which transforms. Time and time again, Levine's extraordinary sensitivity to the moment-and to language-renders me speechless in awe and agreement." -Ruth Schwartz

"A deep maternal sympathy animates Julia Levine's splendid second collection, which confronts suffering at every turn, and finds beauty in stray moments, in sudden encounters with the natural world. Ask is a book that asks us to think by feeling; it is an inviting, lyrical, moving book." -Edward Hirsch

"Julia Levine's new poems locate themselves at the far boundary of what we can know, and from there she steps forward ito a world as tender as it is brutal, a world in which "sunlight between the storms / seems a small and wild room / just before the afterworld." There is a reckless courage at work here, a lyrical imagination that has little patience with easy and familiar answers. Levine has written a heartfelt and disarming interrogation of the gods of sex, language, death, and memory." -James Kimbrell

'I am moved by Julia Levine's singing. These poems are about the tenderness that's beneath everything, even the horror. Levine writes with a full heart and I am grateful for such a true talent as hers." - Anne Marie Macari

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Tampa
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1879852942
• ISBN 13: 9781879852945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 117