Phillis Levin’s much-anticipated sixth collection, An Anthology of Rain, is a series of poems immersed in time while acknowledging “how it is / Is not how it is / It keeps changing.” Memories become palpable as the present: a duel of roses between friends and across languages is cause for delight, as is the vision of a father returned to life to assuage the poet’s grief. Light and water are twin elements, whether the “Blighted light” of a leaf turning in early fall or a drop of rain inviting us to trace its movement down a window. A spirit of reciprocity between poet and reader animates this collection, creating what the best poems offer—a thrilling sense of immediacy in the face of flux.
An Anthology of Rain, Phillis Levin
$18.00
Print ISBN: 9781962131063
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 90
Published: April 15, 2025
Phillis Levin’s poetry has been characterized over the past thirty years by an astonishingly consistent excellence. She has written, again and again, across a half-dozen books, poems that are precise, feeling-full and piercing, elegant, informed and aware of the world, and rich in the kind of profound play that is a hallmark of real art. She’s been a central figure, an important and admired figure, in the poetry community. She has a loyal and wide fan base, and she possesses every marker that would indicate a writer’s capacity to break out into new levels of cultural presence, and to command broad attention. She is widely known, deeply admired as a wonderfully authentic writer. — Vijay Seshadri
The poetic line so at ease within its boundaries that motion and stillness compose a single music. Rhyme (cumuli, passersby) and all-but-rhyme (visitor, meander) so cordial in their modulations they might be the products of nature rather than art. As only supreme artistry can achieve. Phillis Levin has long been one of our purest masters of lyric form, and in this ravishing new collection she bids us welcome to a realm of solace and enchantment. Sorrow and loss and foreboding are here as well – how could it be otherwise? – but in the company of a mind like this, one might almost believe our world could remember the contours of peace. I will keep them close, these beautiful poems. — Linda Gregerson
In this stunning new collection, An Anthology of Rain, the insightful observation of Phillis Levin is at its full power. Elegantly understated, there’s a lyric intensity here that reminds us of how closely beauty and heartbreak can co-exist. Whether she trains her eye “on a black cloth, a line of chalk” from a painting by Moroni in Italy’s Cinquecento period, or, within this century, “on a black wave, gentle, thick as night” in her father’s hair, we learn how to see the world around us with a freshness that feels vital now, when too much can both be overlooked and yet longed for. Like many of her poems over her impressive career, these poems reveal what we needed to see—not simply around us but within us—all along, “as if breaking a spell.” Yeah, that’s “how it is.” — A. Van Jordan
Phillis Levin was born in Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of five previous poetry collections and editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Her other books are Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; May Day; Mercury; The Afterimage; and Temples and Fields, which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her honors include a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, an Ingram Merrill Grant, and fellowships from the Amy Lowell Trust, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Levin’s work has appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, The Common, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Poetry London, Raritan, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, Jack Shanewise, in New York.
