My Oceanography

Levin plunges into psychic depths to confront desire, fear and loss. These poems expand borders as her language strives toward transcendence. The life and work of post-minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse serves as a starting point, yet these poems extend far beyond ekphrasis in their imaginative renderings of Hesse’s life against the demands of her art. In exploring the persona’s struggle to create art, Levin’s poems engage the reader and connect us to the demands of work, marriage and the everyday.

Harriet Levin is the author ofThe Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and The Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), a National Poetry Series finalist; and My Oceanography (Cavankerry, 2018). Her novel How Fast Can You Run, (Harvard Square Editions, 2016) grew out of a One Book, One Philadelphia writing project from interviews with Sudanese refugee Michael Majok Kuch and was excepted in The Kenyon Review. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches writing at Drexel University.

Poet-novelist Harriet Levin succeeds brilliantly in entering the life of German-born American painter-sculptor Eva Hesse who died of brain cancer at 36 after early recognition in the New York art scene. Millan’s powers of empathy allow her to capture imagined scenes of Hesse’s failed marriage to a fellow artist, dark auras of her parent’s divorce, all against a backdrop of Hitler’s regime. Levin’s is an impressive feat of art and literary bonding to show a similar love for the physical world: its depth and beauty, its voracity for particulars. This is a richly given, complex book that does honor to a like-minded artist.
– Colette Inez, author of The Luba Poems

Erotic, angry, probing, brilliant, Harriet Levin questions “why I’m an artist, as if such criteria exist —they can see it roil and drift, and urging me on,” and the way in which art is derived from wretched longing, cruelty, anguish and envy, in this haunting and disturbing sketchbook of an artist seeking to form a vision of selfhood from the materials of life. Levincunningly probes the tantalizing and mercurial question of whether the vision is the poet’s or the artist as subject, or a manifestation of both in this searing, original work.”
—Jill Bialosky, Vice President, WW Norton & Company

In this collection of poems of imagined interiors, Harriet Levin examines the life of visual artist Eva Hesse. Levin’s poems move beyond the brushstrokes of emotions. She gives us words sculptured out of a troubled marriage, yet words that still undress to reveal the sensual. This is a poetic sketchbook in which Harriet Levin holds up a mirror for Hesse so she might see herself and be celebrated.
– E. Ethelbert Miller, Editor of Poet Lore and author of If God Invented Baseball

“Survivor, Artist Inspired New Poetry Book,” a Review by Selah Maya Zighelboim (Click to Read on the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent)

Harriet Levin
Pub date – October 2, 2018
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-67-9