Artifice in the Calm Damages, by Andrew Levy

Description

ISBN:978-1-946104-26-7

Poetry, Literature; 176 pages

2021

By Andrew Levy

Andrew Levy is the author of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction 2029, Artifice in the Calm Damages (chapbook), Don’t Forget to Breathe, Nothing Is in Here (novella), and ten other collections of poetry and prose. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous American and international magazines and anthologies, including Poetics-for-the-More-than-Human-World – An Anthology of Poetry & Commentary; Light Abstracts the Smallest Things: The Aesthetics of Basil King; The Canary Islands Connection – 60 Contemporary American Poets; and Resist Much / Obey Little – Inaugural Poems to The Resistance. Levy’s writing works on the intersections of class and the ecology of commerce, and experimental music and the digitalization of freedom. A drummer, he works in collaboration with musicians and poets on readings and performances. He teaches journalism at BMCC-CUNY.

As a drummer, Andrew Levy’s rhythmic knowledge is intimate and the work of Artifice in the Calm Damages moves across a range of percussive possibility, with its long lines and structured blocks of text providing a solid lead to the everyday madness of our sensational public life. As a front-line worker on the pedagogical front, teaching community college in the nation’s largest public urban university system, Levy’s concerns are far from the gravy-train of the poetry business as generally reflected in the ideological morass of the “profession,” with its programs, prizes, and highly managed conformity. Underlying the sometimes extravagant sensory overload that is so much a part of this Artifice, Levy’s poems are ferocious in their political indignation. Exuding an all too rarely articulated sense of class-consciousness—however one reads across the theoretically dense texture of syntactical relations—these Damages are altogether necessary, and very much of our time and place.

— Ammiel Alcalay

A wave of brine infused with smooth buttermilk, ripe bananas and currants; a crackling mouthful of warm creamy cappuccino and toasted marshmallows. As Levy’s line lengthens and deepens, dry espresso, licorice root and tarry smoke. The line goes on and on — long and smoky with tarry espresso, aniseed, toasted almonds and traces of soft barley and fresh pear.

— William Bardbeg

How beautiful, and sadly Arendtable, Fanonable!

awesome, stun w/sting’n visuals, and zingy pow—wow right in the wisher. of better tomorrows. which might just be the day today of yore

your life in there, as often is, like looking thru & thru & into

—to the point, acuity unearthing, discovery… Like those nesting dolls that

fit inside each other, school, girls, meetings, the world, yearning

burning nature all around, sounding alarms. poems which grant little or no escape—from reality

that is, no escape from confronting reality. for all the blues that’s fit to print.

people die every day…for the whack thereof.

— Julie Patton