Neighbor (Second Edition)

Author: Rachel Levitsky 

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2020)

Neighbor’s mutable, shifty narrator alternately reifies and attempts to refuse the constricting, separating, culture-load bearing wall between lovers and neighbors. As antagonisms and intimacies converge, Levitsky troubles the divisions within urban space, and between spatial and ethical frames: “I live on a street where / people turn (on) each other / into a theory.”

This second edition, printed a decade after Neighbor‘s original publication, features an expanded version of the play, “Perfect California: A Family Affair.”

"In and outside the window of Rachel Levitsky’s apartment lie sadness, amusement and conflicted regard for the weirdo constructs of faith and scum politics. Her poet energy is a sweet intellect with lazy compulsive lines dropping onto a free and wishful page, ok with semi-resolve amidst the minor clatter of daily lust."

–Thurston Moore

"Nearly touching are the ethical realm of our obligation to others and the aesthetic world of our freedom from such obligations. Levitsky’s Neighbor confronts this imaginary dividing line—in the process, creating a poetry that both provokes community and critiques our social habituations. This is my neighborhood."

–Charles Bernstein

"Neighbor is a sweet saga of disconnection. A collectivity of loss. Rachel should be working for the city of New York. ‘I’ve decided to use my obsession / with my neighbor as the context / for a discussion of the State.’ That in itself is incredible."

–Eileen Myles

"Each poem has Rachel Levitsky’s voice in it, but the voice is commanding, demanding you in a sexy, provocative way, urging you to travel with her into a plane that is sonic and wry and physical and unknown. And, you let her. Guide you into language."