A review of erica kaufman's 'INSTANT CLASSIC'
In the beginning, I could not face INSTANT CLASSIC directly. Too bright, I could only handle it in bits, my gaze slightly averted. From this peripheral place, kaufman’s book followed me. I carried it with me on the subway, slept with it beside the bed. I gathered what felt like relevant books and films around me. Talismanic. I kept INSTANT CLASSIC, and kaufman, in mind. And then, I could not look away.
On Rachel Levitsky's 'Neighbor': scale / urban systems / representation
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,