Artifice in the Calm Damages

Author: Andrew Levy

Publisher: Chax Press (2021)

"As a drummer, Andrew Levy's rhythmic knowledge is intimate and the work of Artifice in the Calm Damages moves across a range of percussive possibility, with its long lines and structured blocks of text providing a solid lead to the everyday madness of our sensational public life. As a front-line worker on the pedagogical front, teaching community college in the nation's largest public urban university system, Levy's concerns are far from the gravy-train of the poetry business as generally reflected in the ideological morass of the 'profession,' with its programs, prizes, and highly managed conformity. Underlying the sometimes extravagant sensory overload that is so much a part of this Artifice, Levy's poems are ferocious in their political indignation. Exuding an all too rarely articulated sense of class-consciousness—however one reads across the theoretically dense texture of syntactical relations––these Damages are altogether necessary, and very much of our time and place."

–Ammiel Alcalay

"How beautiful, and sadly Arendtable, Fanonable! awesome, stun w/sting'n visuals, and zingy pow—wow right in the wisher. of better tomorrows. which might just be the day today of yore your life in there, as often is, like looking thru & thru & into—to the point, acuity unearthing, discovery... Like those nesting dolls that fit inside each other, school, girls, meetings, the world, yearning burning nature all around, sounding alarms. poems which grant little or no escape—from reality that is, no escape from confronting reality. for all the blues that's fit to print. people die every day...for the whack thereof."

–Julie Patton