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Today's poem is "Cave"
from Travels of Marco

Four Way Books

Mark Levine is the author of three previous books of poems, Debt, Enola Gay, and The Wilds, and a book of nonfiction, F5. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, an NEA, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Books by Mark Levine:

Other poems on the web by Mark Levine:
Four poems
Three poems
"Ontario"
"Creek"
Five poems
"Work Song"
Seven poems

Mark Levine According to Wikipedia.

About Travels of Marco:

"'It was like stepping into a telescope / unseen,' writes Mark Levine in his new collection, 'into the dark distorted center.' A work of dark optics, Travels of Marco reflects our post-traumatic millenial condition through a savage burlesque of literary forms, re-purposed historical idioms--ranging from pitch-perfect Edwardian intonations to wry Catskills schtick and beyond--and a nightmarish derangement of sensation itself. Few poets 'speak into the currency' of our time with such rage, wonder, and sorrow. Travels of Marco is an incendiary book that warrants its own warning label: 'Secure your suspenders, / Restrain your tender / Parts, prepare for wild / Surrender.'"
—Srikanth Reddy

"Travels of Marco is a captivating lyric invention of nimble leaps and twists of wit. It is also an eloquent and affecting meditation on fatherhood, striking in its articulations of love's lonely and austere offices: 'for I had no more business in this life.' There is a tender graceful quality to these poems as much as there is a stirring, passionate ability to throw down rhymes like it's snake eyes. This is sheer no-nonsense joy."
— D.A. Powell

"In an as-though-ancient age, ours, a father tightens his belt: money has rendered nature nothing but pure value, and poetic speech now lives, like next-to-nothing, in the mouth. Mark Levine's Travels of Marco is eerie and tough; stopping just short of elegy, his lyrics disgorge a feeling they're too strong to name, like poems written by neglected mechanics, or by capital's mechanisms of--this time I'll write 'regret,' though the market disallows it. Can a market be addressed? How about a future? Levine's father-speaker rhymes like George Herbert & prays like a man who knows better, singing his way through the disused industries & repurposed traditions of a land a lot like this one. These poems make me sad, they make me laugh, they kind of kill me. Do I understand them? I don't know. They haunt me."
—Ariana Reines



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