Bøker av Elizabeth Joy Levinson

No ecological system is without conflict. Uncomfortable Ecologies is an exploration of relationships and their tenuous nature. Levinson explores the domestic and wild, the macro and the micro, the familiar and the other, the objective and the confessional. These poems seek to uncover vulnerabilities within ecologies as a bridge to a new level of understanding and intimacy. The speaker parallels the irreparable losses faced in our environment due to habitat destruction and climate change with the challenges of families facing poverty and addiction. Trees shatter in extreme weather, oceans rinse a family of their dreams, wolves protect one another by inflicting pain. But the pain is punctuated by moments of visceral tenderness, a bird in a hand, the velvet of a bee. Difficult choices made for the sake of love. The very heart of this book is the belief that our disconnection from nature is a disconnection from each other. The heart of this book is grief and loss, but the hope of this book is healing.

"The beautiful poems in Elizabeth Joy Levinson's Running Aground do not blink. They swim open eyed into the land of hard, sand-scrubbed love and loneliness and pain. And they speak for us girls so rarely seen in poems, difficult, poor, wild sea girls. These are poems of strong images and haunting lines, truth poems, father poems, ocean poems. It is a collection I will read and re-read again and again." -Leigh Camacho Rourks, author of Moon Trees and Other Orphans"Elizbeth Joy Levinson's Running Aground navigates us through ports of poverty, sea creatures, Florida & the dangers of opening one's mouth & speaking (or not). Thankfully, Levinson does speak out in these poems full of deft lyricism, pacing & powerful metaphors. She guides us through moments of peril like a jellyfish coming too close & the heartache in seeing a father run aground. These poems fuse images & language of land & sea, of ships & cars packed w/suitcases, of mermaids & girls reaching out w/fingers "trying/ to hold everything/ at once." With Levinson as our captain, the poems in Running Aground will steadily sail on & steer our way through troubled waters & time." -Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the Crown, winner of the 2018 APR/Honickman First Book Prize