LIGHTS I HAVE SEEN BEFOREThe children are off somewhereand when I wakenI hear onlythe buzz of currentin the TVand the refrigeratorgroaning against the comingday. I rise and wash;there is nothingto think of exceptthe insistent pushof water, and the pipe's

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters a...

California Studies in Classical Antiquity: Volume 7 offers a rich and diverse collection of scholarly essays that delve into the history, literature, philosophy, and art of the ancient world. This volume brings together insightful research on pivotal topics, from ancient Greek battles and Roman connections to philosophical thought and poetic structures, offering readers an engaging exploration of classical antiquity. Key essays include Herbert Abramson's analysis of the Olympieion in Athen...

Dive into the rich world of classical scholarship with California Studies in Classical Antiquity: Volume 10, a compelling collection of essays that explore diverse aspects of ancient history, literature, and culture. This volume brings together the work of leading scholars, offering fresh perspectives and in-depth analyses on topics ranging from ancient Greek military strategy to Roman mythology. Highlights include Evelyn Elizabeth Bell's examination of two Krokotos mask cups at San Simeon...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995Writtenin a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.

Essays, speeches, and journal entries from one of our most admired and best-loved poets that illuminate how he came to understand himself as a poet, the events and people that he wrote about, and the older poets who influenced him.In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate year, he recounts...

The final collection of new poems from one of our finest and most beloved poets.The poems in this wonderful collection touch all of the events and places that meant the most to Philip Levine. There are lyrical poems about his family and childhood, the magic of nighttime and the power of dreaming; tough poems about the heavy shift work at Detroit's auto plants, the Nazis, and bosses of all kinds; telling poems about his heroes--jazz players, artists, and working peo...

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Levine published Sweet Will, his eleventh volume of poems, in 1985. His last book with Atheneum, it has been unavailable for many years. Because of its subdued and thoughtful nature, it was seen as a transitional book for Levine, one that presaged the tone of much that was to come. Peter Stitt, writing in the Kenyon Review, called it “the quietest book that Philip Levine has ever written,” concluding that “though the river that glides th...

The Winter 2014-15 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.This staff-edited issue of Ploughshares features a diverse collection of poems, essays, and stories. The prose ranges from surreal humor -- David Cameron's "Mannequin," about a ...

The inspiration for the title poem of Philip Levine’s A Walk with Tom Jefferson is not the founding father and third president of the United States that most readers would imagine upon hearing the name. Levine’s Tom Jefferson is quite different from his namesake: he is an African American living in a destitute area of industrial Detroit. But to Levine, he is “wise, compassionate, deliberate, honest…a great unknown American.” In A Walk with Tom Jefferson, Philip Levine rem...

Gerald Stern has been a significant presence and an impassioned and idiosyncratic voice in twentieth and twenty-first-century American poetry. Insane Devotion is a retrospective of his career and features fourteen writers, critics, and poets examining the themes, stylistic traits, and craft of a poet who has shaped and inspired American verse for generations.The essays and interviews in Insane Devotion paint a broad picture of a m...

Always a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine looks back at his own life as well as the adventures of his ancestors, his relatives, and his friends, and at their rites of passage into an America of victories and betrayals. He transports us back to the street where he was born “early in the final industrial century” to help us envision an America he’s known from the 1930s to the present. His subjects include his brothers, a great-uncle who gave up on America and returned to czarist R...