Unselected Poems

For over 30 years now readers of contemporary poetry have known Levine's work for its elegiac narrative, its forceful rhythms and rhetoric, and its Vivas praising the dignity of the human spirit. With Unselected Poems he rescues many of his best earlier poems and offers a selection of stunning new and uncollected work. --Christopher Buckley. His poems are about endurance in all its senses, and that is their affirmation. They are about the kind of courage people have when courage fails. In short, they are such poems as possess, beyond their technical strength and emotional urgency, a kind of necessity: whatever it is the truth must exist -- for all our sakes. --Hayden Carruth, Bookletter.