Enola Gay

"A man steps into an abandoned church, notes the debris at the altar, misses his mother, and starts to sing. Thus begins Mark Levine's astonishing second collection of poems which meld wit with the profoundest gravity, peculiar narratives with linguistic precision, and hubris with sorrow. Read them."--Susan Wheeler, author of Smokes and Bag O' Diamonds

"Mark Levine's new poems conjure a post-cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic world. Here things here tend to be rusty, wet, subject to dry rot, incomplete, or just plain out of kilter. People react to each other, but strangely or tentatively; they maybe 'asleep in the reeds with the migrating sea birds.' There are unlikely lists: 'Accordion, bamboo, crinoline, drift. / Burial, crabgrass, demonstration, edge.' It's a terrifying but hallucinatory interregnum, where '. . . the dead and the sick and the poor are singing too. / And the stars begin to fall, and though everybody is waiting / for a terrible surprise, it hasn't come, not just yet.' The ghosts who are waiting are memorable, and reading Enola Gay is an unforgettable experience." --John Ashbery

Mark Levine is author of Debt, Jorie Graham's selection for publication in the National Poetry Series in 1993. He has received a Whiting Writers Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 1994-1995 he was the Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton. He teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. As a contributor to The New Yorker and Outside, Levine has reported on cultural, environmental, and social issues on four continents.