Under the Sun
Rachel Levitsky
“Rachel Levitsky's savvy, slippery Under the Sun defies metaphor as a path to transparent meaning...an expansive, evolving book which dips in and out of logic, beauty, politics and selves.”
—Arielle Greenberg, Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Mixing language and observations that are equal parts challenging, erotic, enigmatic, and playful, Under the Sun is a remarkable tumble through an emotional funhouse where scares, passions and mirth divert us from the ennui and disappointments of everyday life.”
—Phil Hall, Gay City News (read entire review)
“Gender is a pathway to a transformation of type into type. Poetry because it is a complex occasion of forces realizes the emerging forms of the imagination—the social imagination of our private transformations.”
—Dale Smith, Jacket Magazine (read entire review)
“Rachel Levitsky brilliantly designs mysterious flying objects of language and of desire, as she succeeds in giving each word an intriguing span of life. Her poems are theater, teaser, solution, entretien de tension which keep meaning and its boundaries open for intimate manuvres of reading.”
—Nicole Brossard
“Under the Sun operates on the small stages of intimate conflict and longing, but casts light outside the ring: we see the shadows of the crowd, we smell the dirty water that slaps against the piers. It's a formulation and un-doing of the personal. Intimacy excavated yields characters, ironic and adrift, who quiver in the jackets of their names. We know them by contact, or contract, an occupation of looks and resistance. The poem enacts the force of situated desire. Under the Sun is brilliant wit wrenching poetics: a word stream taking its shirt off.”
—Camille Roy
“I am struck by the intellectual verve of this poem, its complex sense of the architecture of the poem as it responds to diverse literary traditions. This long poem creates rooms of and room for playfulness, humour, political anger, and aesthetic pleasures. It isn't static; it moves; it reads itself and interrogates.”
—Carla Harryman
About the Author
Rachel levitsky is also the author of Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003) Neighbor (UDP, 2009) and Against Travel (Pamenar, 2020). In 1999 she founded the feminist avant-garde network Belladonna* series which later became the autonomous Belladonna* collaborative. During the spring and summer 2020 confinement (of the Covid-19 pandemic) she hosted a series of simultaneous collaborative variously ambulatory walks. She is a Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute.
“Rachel Levitsky's savvy, slippery Under the Sun defies metaphor as a path to transparent meaning...an expansive, evolving book which dips in and out of logic, beauty, politics and selves.”
—Arielle Greenberg, Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Mixing language and observations that are equal parts challenging, erotic, enigmatic, and playful, Under the Sun is a remarkable tumble through an emotional funhouse where scares, passions and mirth divert us from the ennui and disappointments of everyday life.”
—Phil Hall, Gay City News (read entire review)
“Gender is a pathway to a transformation of type into type. Poetry because it is a complex occasion of forces realizes the emerging forms of the imagination—the social imagination of our private transformations.”
—Dale Smith, Jacket Magazine (read entire review)
“Rachel Levitsky brilliantly designs mysterious flying objects of language and of desire, as she succeeds in giving each word an intriguing span of life. Her poems are theater, teaser, solution, entretien de tension which keep meaning and its boundaries open for intimate manuvres of reading.”
—Nicole Brossard
“Under the Sun operates on the small stages of intimate conflict and longing, but casts light outside the ring: we see the shadows of the crowd, we smell the dirty water that slaps against the piers. It's a formulation and un-doing of the personal. Intimacy excavated yields characters, ironic and adrift, who quiver in the jackets of their names. We know them by contact, or contract, an occupation of looks and resistance. The poem enacts the force of situated desire. Under the Sun is brilliant wit wrenching poetics: a word stream taking its shirt off.”
—Camille Roy
“I am struck by the intellectual verve of this poem, its complex sense of the architecture of the poem as it responds to diverse literary traditions. This long poem creates rooms of and room for playfulness, humour, political anger, and aesthetic pleasures. It isn't static; it moves; it reads itself and interrogates.”
—Carla Harryman
About the Author
Rachel levitsky is also the author of Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003) Neighbor (UDP, 2009) and Against Travel (Pamenar, 2020). In 1999 she founded the feminist avant-garde network Belladonna* series which later became the autonomous Belladonna* collaborative. During the spring and summer 2020 confinement (of the Covid-19 pandemic) she hosted a series of simultaneous collaborative variously ambulatory walks. She is a Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute.
