What Outlives Us

Whether traveling south of the border, in classrooms, or into the misty memories of childhood, Larry Levy looks with eyes keen to detail. And thereby, readers are asked to be keener to the details of their own world. And, like the finest poets, Levy does not tell us what to think about the details he brings to light. Poetry, for him, is never a lesson or a lecture. Instead, he simply highlights the sublime, leaving readers with a new approach to the world…an approach more open-eyed, but also more open-hearted.                                     

~ Jeff Vande Zande, author of American Poet

Always a master of the rambunctious family gathering’s ability to bridge differences and heal wounds, Larry Levy goes international in rendering a party in the Yucatan in loud, loving and bi-lingual detail. Another poem in the same sequence shows that he’s maintained and even sharpened another characteristic: his quiet precision. This is the book of a life-long writer continuing to push into new territory. It’s well worth following him there.                       

~ John Palen, author of Distant Music

From “posters I could partly read” on the first day of kindergarten, to “What Do People Do All Day?” to elegies for friends and relatives, you may well emerge from reading Levy’s third fine poetry collection with a renewed sense of how clear poetic language, wielded skillfully, can renew our deeper seeing, and our very lives.                               

~ Skip Renker, author of Bearing the Cast

In this new collection, Larry Levy’s vision expands, and the poet pushes outward, often to places unknown and, at times, seemingly unsought. We visit parents who have passed and the sports fields of our youth, the awkward inevitability of desegregation, all that we outlive but that “outlives us.”  

~ John Jeffire, author of Motown Burning