What Outlives Us, by Larry Levy

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 Birds of Passage, Sifting the Visible, and 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 and River Rouge

Buy it now here, on Amazon, or via order from your local bookstore.

Larry Levy’s previous collections of poetry include I Would Stay Forever If I Could and New Poems (Mayapple Press) and All the Dead are Holy (Atmosphere Press).

His poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Driftwood Review, Third Wednesday, South Carolina Review, Controlled Burn, and other little and online magazines.  For several years he has served as judge for Third Wednesday’s annual poetry contest.

Retired from teaching at every level from pre-school to graduate school, Larry and his wife Cheryl live in Midland, Michigan where they direct plays and musicals for the Midland Center for the Arts youth theater.