This remarkable collection by an acclaimed poet follows the experiences of a woman whose infant grandson has been diagnosed with cancer. The poet traces the spiritual trial, the battle between hope and despair, that almost consumes her and the child's parents, while in the background, she observes early signs of environmental collapse. Through deftly crafted language that delves unflinchingly into the heart of suffering, Levine helps us to confront the most difficult questions related to our urge for survival and our desire for meaning. Great passages of understanding and insight lift us out of ourselves, disclosing core truths of the terrible and beautiful world in which we live and dream. Winner of the Wolfson Press Poetry Chapbook Prize.
About the Author :
Julia B. Levine's recent poetry awards include the 2015 Northern California Book Award for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU 2014), a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2024 Terrain Poetry Prize, the 2023 Oran Robert Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review, as well as a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work in building resiliency in teenagers in the context of climate change. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and Prairie Schooner. She earned a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry from Pacific University. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU 2021), won a Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry. sites.google.com/view/juliablevine
Review :
"Julia Levine's Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction is an album of moments, a testament to a family's love in the face of pediatric oncology. These poems distill so many days and memories down to their most particular bright and painful details - the lavender fields, the hallways full of ghosts and origami cranes, the family huddled around a crib as if warming their hands by a fire. Levine astonished me poem after poem by refusing easy answers and predictable comforts. There were so many questions with unknown answers, so many prayers that were answered with "death only asks for everything." Every line woke up a new corner of my heart. If you are constantly in awe of how the body is a difficult miracle, this book is for you." -
"Blurbs are supposed to be, or often are, these very lofty, poetically rote pieces of language. You read one you read 'em all. Julia asked me to write one for her newest collection, Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction. So I read the book. I read it twice. It worked on my body. It made me weep like a child. It made me cry my eyes out like a father, like a parent. How do you withstand the living moments when a grandchild is sick, has cancer? You explore death from the outside. That's what Julia Levine does in these poems: she explores death, being up against it, being slammed up against a wall and a wave by the possibility of the death of her grandchild in poems that have the most bone-aged tenderness in them that all you can do, if you are any kind of breathing, sweating, soaked built person, is cry. This is a crying book. It's a love book filled with a love you can't even put into words, and that's what happens. That's what happened to me. I wanted to go home and hold my kids or just talk smack with them and laugh and yell and fall down and get up because we could, because we can. I did not want to write this blurb because I don't know how. The poems in this collection don't deserve words. You just have to read them and let them work their gut-magic on your body because if we all did there would be no worry about the next world extinction, or at least the next extinction would not be created by the human element, because there would just be too much love. That's what Julia Levine's poems are in Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction: they are too much love that they are the best sweetest song ever." -
