Mr. Memory & Other Poems

Look inside
A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

An intimate, richly textured new collection from Phillis Levin, a poet whose work "shimmers with gracefulness" (David Baker)


Phillis Levin's fifth collection of poems encompasses a wide array of styles and voices while staying true to a visionary impulse sparked as much by the smallest detail as the most sublime landscape. From expansive meditation to haiku, in ode and epistle, dream sequence and elegy, Levin's new poems explore motifs deeply social and historical, personal and metaphysical. Their various strategies deploy the sonic powers of lyric, the montage techniques of cinema, and the atavistic energies of the oral tradition. Throughout this volume, the singularity of person, place, and thing--and the plurality of our experience--assert their uncanny presence: an ash on a crackling log, a character from Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, a burgundy scarf, an x-ray of Bruegel's "Massacre of the Innocents," and a demitasse cup from Dresden are all woven into a collection by turns rhapsodic and ironic, caustic and incantatory. The pre-Socratic mathematician Zeno facing the riddle of an ordinary day; a cloudbank of silence; a pair of second-hand shoes bought for Anne Frank; two  crows at play above the peak of a mountain; a dot flickering on the horizon: intimate and philosophical, these poems unveil the metamorphic properties of mind and nature.
Phillis Levin is the author of Mr. Memory & Other Poems, Temples and Fields, The Afterimage, Mercury, and May Day, and editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. She has received the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Bogliasco Fellowship, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry London, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Agni, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Hofstra University and resides in New York. View titles by Phillis Levin

About

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

An intimate, richly textured new collection from Phillis Levin, a poet whose work "shimmers with gracefulness" (David Baker)


Phillis Levin's fifth collection of poems encompasses a wide array of styles and voices while staying true to a visionary impulse sparked as much by the smallest detail as the most sublime landscape. From expansive meditation to haiku, in ode and epistle, dream sequence and elegy, Levin's new poems explore motifs deeply social and historical, personal and metaphysical. Their various strategies deploy the sonic powers of lyric, the montage techniques of cinema, and the atavistic energies of the oral tradition. Throughout this volume, the singularity of person, place, and thing--and the plurality of our experience--assert their uncanny presence: an ash on a crackling log, a character from Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, a burgundy scarf, an x-ray of Bruegel's "Massacre of the Innocents," and a demitasse cup from Dresden are all woven into a collection by turns rhapsodic and ironic, caustic and incantatory. The pre-Socratic mathematician Zeno facing the riddle of an ordinary day; a cloudbank of silence; a pair of second-hand shoes bought for Anne Frank; two  crows at play above the peak of a mountain; a dot flickering on the horizon: intimate and philosophical, these poems unveil the metamorphic properties of mind and nature.

Author

Phillis Levin is the author of Mr. Memory & Other Poems, Temples and Fields, The Afterimage, Mercury, and May Day, and editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. She has received the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Bogliasco Fellowship, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry London, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Agni, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Hofstra University and resides in New York. View titles by Phillis Levin

Three Penguin Random House Authors Win Pulitzer Prizes

On Monday, May 5, three Penguin Random House authors were honored with a Pulitzer Prize. Established in 1917, the Pulitzer Prizes are the most prestigious awards in American letters. To date, PRH has 143 Pulitzer Prize winners, including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Josh Steinbeck, Ron Chernow, Anne Applebaum, Colson Whitehead, and many more. Take a look at our 2025 Pulitzer Prize

Read more

Books for LGBTQIA+ Pride Month

In June we celebrate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual + (LGBTQIA+) Pride Month, which honors the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. Pride Month is a time to both celebrate the accomplishments of those in the LGBTQ+ community and recognize the ongoing struggles faced by many across the world who wish to live

Read more