Artifice in the Calm Damages by Andrew Levy

Description

ISBN 9781946104076

Poetry: 32 pages

2017

Chapbook / Letterpress Covers with original cover painting by Cynthia Miller.

Andrew Levy remains convinced that poets have to think dangerously and let themselves be kidnapped by contemporary hyper-complexities: they must embrace and forsake our present humanist and nationalist world for a wider horizon at once ecological, local, and global. Levy’s philosophical style strikes a balance between the innovative academicism of a scholarly poet and a certain sense of anti-academicism (witness his ongoing interest in the ideas of Bill Reading and George Lewis). Disturbing, musical, poetic, anarchic, and punctuated by improvisational bursts of syncopated incompleteness, Artifice in the Calm Damages is tempered by a Bohmian aesthetic powerfully evocative of the lost and desperate side streets and tweets of American life. Imagine Dorn’s Slinger, dead and missing, walking the highways and low-ways in search of Mar-a-Lago only to find no one on the premises but Ramon Hernandez. The humor is dry, dark, and, landing on the wrong note, conveys a heartfelt rage. Levy’s book is a remarkable study in verse and prose of the depravity and diseased charisma infecting “America First.” It’s a keeper.

Artifice in the Calm Damages has been produced as a hybrid book arts edition. The text of the book is printed via digital technology, while the cover, on yellow Samuel French paper with French flaps extending the width of the book, has been printed letterpress on a Vandercook 215T Press and hand painted by the visual artist Cynthia Miller, so that each copy of the book is a unique copy.