Forget About Sleep
“In the winner, Forget about Sleep by Miriam Levine, I found a collection suffused with the varied emotions and questions that come from a lifetime of memories—about childhood friends, adolescent romance, desire, pain, aging parents, parents of friends—about community and its relationship to the beautiful if indifferent natural world that nonetheless remains ever- open to meaning. Ultimately, the poems here trace the exquisite struggle to make meaning. Expansive and profound, Forget about Sleep is a triumph.”
Forget About Sleep
Miriam Levine
March 2024
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In Forget about Sleep, her sixth poetry collection, Miriam Levine remembers lost lovers, friends, her beloved family, and celebrates treasured places and the near and dear still alive.
“The last line of the first poem in Miriam Levine's new book, Forget about Sleep, says it all: "we're not done with love." The poem's title, "Deeper, Darker" sets the context for this love. It happens in the midst of much loss. But happens it does, thanks to Levine's deep attention to the sensuous details of this world which guide her again and again back into the heart of love. There is something timeless about these poems; as if they could have been written a thousand years ago by someone who saw deeply into the world as it truly is. And yet, they were written now and speak urgently to our current moment. What more can we ask of a book of poetry?”
“Miriam Levine's Forget about Sleep is a love letter to our world, an ode to memory and all she has wistfully stored. "Such terrible things in this world," it's true, and yet Levine holds on to all that is bright—daffodils, Zebra longwings, victory gardens, the moon, and the sea. Celebratory, clear-eyed, meditative, Levine's poems are mature and honest renderings on our humanness. ”
“Miriam Levine’s work in her new collection, Forget About Sleep, is strong, and delicate, and tolerant. We do well to pay attention to its quiets, and its humor, and to its dancing, descriptive moments, but also to its more demanding ones – where the poet considers what is to come, and where courage has been, or will be, required. I marvel at Levine’s gradations of tone—she shows us variations of calm, from a thoughtful and peaceful one, to one that must be wished for, if not always achieved. Levine’s poems make us aware of all that we’ve been given, and also of all that may yet be received.”
“An homage to eros in new poetry collection. "I love bodily things," writes poet Miriam Levine in her latest collection, "Forget about Sleep" (NYQ Books). That love — reverence, attraction, curiosity — is apparent in her lines and in between them. I like her attention on the male body, "the oblique muscles and swelling sex." Elsewhere, she sees a man who looks like a Greek statue, like a figure arriving from Crete to a small town where "an old woman like me/ would say she had seen/ a god." Of remembering a first lover, she writes, "His head is turned to the side, angling/ toward his shoulder as if he were shy being/ so dead." The vital force of aliveness, eros, desire, pleasure ("why would/ you ever want to leave the earth?"), rub shoulder-to-shoulder with mortality, our candle quick to be blown out, or, perhaps more aptly here, all of us flowers quick to bloom and quick to fade. For Levine, the floral, the arboreal count as bodily things, too, the marigolds and roses, witch hazel, laurel, and lilacs. Sunset’s fleeting blaze carries the same force, "a long pink slit … turned/ fruity, darker, lit like wine/ held to fire." Charged in its changing, in its total temporariness, in the great pleasure, so acute, so fast. Levine, the first poet laureate of Arlington, who lives part time in New Hampshire, honors the flesh, which is to say, the human — how lucky we are, to have senses, skin, the confusion of want, to know an "eely tongue" and the "spice of lilacs." To be alive and feel "a stinging sweetness fill me/ with desire that had no object.”