New York

On Rachel Levitsky's 'Neighbor': scale / urban systems / representation

Davy Knittle

Rachel Levitsky’s 2009 poetry collection, Neighbor, takes up the relationship between neighbors as it occurs between people in an apartment building who share walls and floors, but also as it affords other intimacies. Levitsky’s figure of the neighbor contains the idea of the neighbor (a person who lives near you, and whose proximity can produce a mutual, if fragmentary, knowledge of one another’s quotidian lives) alongside neighborliness at a range of competing and simultaneous scales. 

Rachel Levitsky’s 2009 poetry collection, Neighbor, takes up the relationship between neighbors as it occurs between people in an apartment building who share walls and floors, but also as it affords other intimacies. Levitsky’s figure of the neighbor contains the idea of the neighbor (a person who lives near you, and whose proximity can produce a mutual, if fragmentary, knowledge of one another’s quotidian lives) alongside neighborliness at a range of competing and simultaneous scales. In one poem called “Neighbor,” Levitsky writes,

Jump

Kristin Dykstra
Jumping portrait of Urayoán Noel by ADÁL. 2015.
Jumping portrait of Urayoán Noel by ADÁL. 2015.

Note: Photograph is from the collaborative project Cuerpo del Poema, by Irizelma Robles and ADÁL.

Translations by Urayoán Noel, like his poetry and criticism, are deeply enjoyable.  They announce the presence of a vital mind – insightful, singular and often funny.  Poems bound, spitting energy.  The best part is that even at their most frenetic, the writings emerge out of a long, patient, and illuminating investigation into cultural forms and traditions.

Syndicate content