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Field Notes from an Illusion
, and you will find memories that ride on steam from a cup of tea, a melody that's gotten stuck in your brain, the loss of a beloved bookstore, moving mountains made of sand, an ancestor climbing out of her photograph, the slow erasure of a mind, even a house taken back by a waiting forest. Though life offers a balance of illusion and reality, poetry invites us to break free and take a new look at the illusory, the fantastical and the what-if and to toss it all around in our imaginations and on the page. Lois Levinson's poems ask us to explore the diminishing and endangered through the lenses of reflection, moonlight, decay, misperception, imminent loss, and hope.
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"Her studious-but-playful gaze falls on what she loves and lights it up: mule deer antlers are
moon-silvered
; a coyote's
well fed and swaggering like a senator
; and bluebird eggs seem
insubstantial as rings of blue smoke suspended in air.
But Levinson understands that we are finally as insubstantial as what we study; her melancholy negotiations with the fact of limit lends her seeing a poignant urgency."
-Mark Doty, Winner of the National Book Award
"Rich in images both lush and precise, it asks us to consider the ways we connect with its many life forms... a poetic journey layered with hope of future possibilities."
-Madelyn Garner, author of
Hum of Our Blood