Praise for Reports, Finalist, Midwest Book Award
“These poems embody grief and solitude with a masterful grace and ferocity, each webbed to the next with the immediacy of loss and the persistence of survival. Reports is a collection of incantations, demanding its readers to ‘break this world wide open.’ To testify. To live.”
—Rachel McKibbens, author of Pink Elephant
“Kathryn Levy’s unadorned, necessary poems are incantations against pain, loneliness, the ghosts of the past, mortality, and the collective trials of humanity. I admire the restless attempt in this artful work to nail down anxiety, both personal and global. What saves us from the world’s reports, Levy reminds us, are ‘the tiny purple flowers . . . of a second spring.’ And like her grave and unflinching speaker, we hold our breath waiting.”
—Jill Bialosky, author of Intruder
“Kathryn Levy is a poet who drives all night, a poet who presses ‘the pedal / as far as it goes,’ to tell us about our world in which ‘The air is hungry—it wants / your loves, your body.’ Reports is haunted—by childhood memories, by profound loss, by lovers who might never have existed, by husbands who could be dead or alive—because this is a world in which there is nothing secure to hold onto, a world we’ve created by what we choose to ignore.”
—Kenny Fries, author of Body, Remember
Praise for Losing the Moon
“A labor of intensity and clarity went into the writing of Kathryn Levy’s book of poems, Losing the Moon. Her poems are serene and lyrical, and bright like a day with open sky. Levy’s accumulation of images, ideas, and variations among these, makes for an important debut. Kathryn Levy is a wonderful and provocative poet.”
—Michael Burkard
“These are poems written in the dark heart of night, poems in homage to long gone parents, to lovers, to childhood, to the ghost of the past: ‘a fist pounded so long, / it didn’t matter.’ Kathryn Levy’s gift, her unflinching quest for penetration and her powerful desire to ‘settle the questions” that finally can’t be settled, fuels her poetry with urgency, fragility, and grace.'”
—Jill Bialosky
“’Back to life I said / because I know the dark / is filled with ghosts’ — this poet knows the dark in all its different shades and can name all the ghosts. But behind the hypnotic voice in this seamless book is a strong lyric impulse toward light and life.”
—Harvey Shapiro
“In this impressive collection of hard-edged poems, Kathryn Levy warns us that joy is an elusive thing lurking in the back of the brain, as dim as the silent, chilly moon. Each of these poems is a shaped and polished achievement. … Uncompromising as life itself, this poetic terrain is a land of icy dreamscapes. . . . It is always winter, they keep saying; what went wrong? Abandon hope, they say; or be very, very brave.”
—Philip Appleman
“The chill of timelessness pervades Kathryn Levy’s stark and challenging elegies at the heart of Losing the Moon. The reality that mankind cannot bear too much of is what she sees and caresses, so beautifully.”
—Star Black
“Reading Kathryn Levy’s courageous reports from the far edges of loss and sadness is like listening to Muddy Waters singing the blues — equally dark, and equally redeeming. Bravo.”
—Anthony Brandt
Essays editor, Pushcart Prize
