Neighbor

by Rachel D. Levitsky

Poetry. This second edition, printed a decade after NEIGHBOR's original publication, features an expanded version of the play, "Perfect A Family Affair." 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 "I live on a street where / people turn (on) each other / into a theory."

"In her second full-length collection, Levitsky challenges readers with an expansive sequence of poems that vigorously dissemble and reassemble notions of what a poem is and does [ ... ] A decisively innovative book; NEIGHBOR is brimming with sharply reported discoveries."-- Publishers Weekly .

"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.

"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.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published July 14, 2009

Reviews

[Sparrow .]

What is neighborliness? (Certainly this word is never used anymore.)

Zoom replaced neighbors during the pandemic, and neighbors never quite rebounded.

But Rachel wrote this book in 2015, before the end of local friendliness.

Did she really sleep with her neighbor?

Possibly.

And she’s on the right track. “The personal is political” is wrong. Politics begins with the people next door.

The neo-primitive cover shows neighboring cherries, or maybe just red ovals.

Opening at random:

RATIONAL RESPONSE:
(to Noetic N. Delirium who is now on the stage end of the phone with a voice that is aggressive, newly awake, not yet taken by the day by taking it, betraying a sexual urge. Stage turns onto Rational)

Good morning
um um um
Princess
I was dreaming, no I was

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool, incisive lines and stanzas in places, but overall rather theoretical and “commentative,” content more important than form.

[Blake Nemec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart, sordid portrayals about the state or is about trash and who takes it out? Hard to say. Avant-garde queer lines and a play about writing. Love this book!