The Imagined Country. Poetry by Jake Levine. Paperback. 88 pages. May 16th, 2023. ISBN 9781948800594.

“The first thing I love about Jake Levine’s poems is their memorability. His phrases enter the mind and make themselves very much at home, you want to quote them, they keep coming back on the tongue. The second thing is the fact that Jake Levine is a master of tone: there is so much tension between the lines because emotions are in conflict, and even if everything is quiet, we are told it is a quiet no one can imagine / and sometimes I lop both my ears off. There is no end to hilarity, and yet there is so much quiet that comes after the belly-full laugh. The third thing I love is Jake Levine’s imagery. I mean, how can you not be impressed by the eye that sees days like books made of ice melting down the shelves—but this is not just skill for the skill’s sake. There is a deep need for artfulness here, for metaphorical texture; the poet, for all his beautiful bravado (surely, Jake Levine would agree with Frank O’Hara’s notion that a lyric poet rides on the nerve alone) is mining unanswerable questions, searching for meaning of our being here at all. My evidence? It is right here in the fierce river that splits your country / I swim inside the ribcage / of the invented self, diagramming / the memory of a field I call home. That, friends is a metaphysics. And Jake Levine, via images, tone, and music, those blessed tools of poetic craft, makes it memorable.”

Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic