Unfurling The Scroll Of Seven Decades by Sandra Beth Levy

Unfurling the Scroll of Seven Decades offers a poet’s tender eye “awed by each vein in a leaf.” And with her dancing healer’s ear, Levy faces a father’s incarceration, engages with spiritual heritage, and celebrates a mother’s enduring wisdom. This urgent collection of witness and intergenerational healing holds that life can feel like “a game of chicken with the Gods,” while inviting us to tend every “acorn burrow[ed]” within.
–Candice M. Kelsey, author of Another Place Altogether

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“Time is a huntress” writes poet Sandra Beth Levy in her debut collection Unfurling The Scroll of Seven Decades—a fitting evocation for a poet whose storytelling is as exacting and piercing as an arrow. This is a collection showcasing a honed braid of emotional intelligence, narrative mastery, and poetic beauty. In an era and culture obsessed with youth to a predatory degree, Levy refreshes us with work that is visceral, joyous, fearless, profound, grounded, generous, warm, and earned. A lifetime in a book.
–Muggs Fogarty, author of Sex Camel

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Sandra Beth Levy’s Unfurling the Scroll of Seven Decades is a breathtaking map of ethos and identity, where various prisons challenge and inform the speaker’s lineage, and these poems are a stunning testimonial to the reparations of the self. Lyrical, wise and astute at trying to make sense of an inchoate world: “a shriek/ in the dark / skies of our genocides.” Rendering the cycles of life from child, parent, spouse, this poet chooses light in the darkness: “hope whimpered through missing teeth.” These poems unearth, excavate, and transform, as the speaker notices the grace of the small daily gestures of joy and pain: “Through the sticky residue of grief,” but alas, Levy’s collection is radiant, startling and life affirming—inhale a sublime treatise of Art and be reawakened.
–Cynthia Atkins, author of Still-Life with God