Life Cycle of a Bear

Steven Kleinman's Life Cycle of a Bear, winner of the 2019 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, selected by C.G. Hanzlicek, is an antidote to a moment defined by fatalism and fake news. The effort to imagine the specific, to show truth and prove it no matter how violent, dominates these poems: a man can be a bear, a death can happen again and again, a dead friend can be every villain while also being remembered as the source of everything good in the world. Kleinman's poems cleave unapologetically to metaphor not in an effort to obfuscate the world, but in order to transform it.

Steven Kleinman is the winner of the 2019 Philip Levine Poetry Prize. Homeschooled, he grew up in suburban Philadelphia, where his parents ran a wood shop—first in a rented garage, and eventually in a large warehouse. His poems navigate the edge of the American Dream, the violence of work, where the lies and hopes are the thickest. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2020, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and many other fine journals. A graduate of the University of Maryland with an MFA in poetry, he is the director of Creative Writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and a contributing editor to the American Poetry Review.