Reviews
"Whether lark as in songbird, or lark as in stunt, these skeptical, fabulous poems pluck pieces from Herrick and Pope like particulate matter from which the wonder of a poem inexplicably grows. Here is the poet Mark Levine at a great height. Sound Fury turns any easy notion of content and context inside out, executing the truth of our effortful helplessness. This book is a feat, a tonal fiesta, but not for this will it keep mattering to me, no--these songs come from somewhere deep underneath: if bawdy, then tender, full of woeful delight."--Sally Keith, author, River House, "Since his debut collection, Debt, Mark Levine has managed to reinvent himself with each new book. In Sound Fury , he turns to canonical poetry, which he has absorbed with love, distaste, and ambivalence, to embark on a chaotic, dream-like romp that puzzles and dazzles with its images and invented forms. The immersive landscapes of these poems might remind one of other fantastic and haunting worlds: environments such as Ian Cheng's endlessly proliferating self-playing video game Emissaries , or Victorian fairy paintings like Richard Dadd's The Fairy Fellers Master-Stroke . Sound Fury amplifies our conception of how the art of the past can be radically transformed and brought renewed into the present--and ultimately of what poetry can be: a realm of expanded possibility and a heightened feeling of being alive. This is an extraordinary book."--Geoffrey Nutter, author, Giant Moth Perishes, "Mark Levine has an extraordinary nose, taste, and mouth for lives low and abject, filthy talkers and doers. Sound Fury --its nouns pressed together loudly and furiously--is distinguished by its intense, continually revved-up virtuosity of voice, its absolutely right pitch, idiom, line cuts, and rhyme, and its large cast of 'scavenging muckers.' Levine's language is unstoppably vigorous and his wit sly; his distinctiveness is his genius for a devastating inwardness. The postmodern disenchantment with the Anthropocene, that farce of human greed and conceit, finds its latest, most confident tracker here."--Cal Bedient, author, The Breathing Place