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PAPER HEAD LAST LYRICS

by Andrew Levy

The long poem at the center of Paper Head Last Lyrics offers a vision of theworld in all its layers, at once beautiful and terrifying. This is a work ofeye, ear, head and heart that manages to keep them all in play, and allalways at risk:

   A mirror flying across the sky
       shattered his point-of-sale
Make a new life

Andrew Levy brings the news!
-- Ron Silliman

Mostly music, the lines in these poems are like monostitches--one-linersstitched on space--but audible as bird calls interrupted only by air. Thisis a belief system:a simultaneity of listening and articulating.
-- Fanny Howe

Writing under any and all influences with a Thoreau-going extravagance, thisIndiana-fed New Yorker staggers out from under the patrolling beam intodiagramless streets and skies, spinning out his reeling little dreidel ("shemade it out of play") into coastal and midland, screened and buggedrealities, always in person, embodying at times intolerably sad but neverutterly dispiriting decompositions (from "One might paint the entire world"to "One might point to and tire of"). I second these e-motions.
-- John Shoptaw

Andrew Levy, in Paper Head Last Lyrics refreshingly overlaps and engages thepaired territories of language and thought, of speech and writing, of thesocial sphere and the textual sphere in a book that doesn't collapsepolitics and "actually existing" social relations into a gooey borderlessmess, but rather moves through them with equal amounts of anger,surveillance, emotive twinges, comedic timing, and uncanny combinations.
-- Jeff Derksen