Before It All Vanishes by Lois Levinson

Red-winged blackbirds, snowy egrets, wrens, owls, woodpeckers—even a “Hitchcock of crows”—there’s no shortage of birds in Lois Levinson’s Before It All Vanishes. But the bountiful world of winged creatures is not Levinson’s most ardent concern. She keeps an equally close eye on the human world, weighing its fragilities, as well as its blessings. Aptly titled, the book focuses its indomitable light on everything Levinson’s eye touches before it all vanishes. What she learns from her sedulous observations—about herself and the rest of us humans— permeates this fine first collection.

–Andrea Hollander, author of Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012

Whether she’s writing about an aging friend, a son deployed to Afghanistan, a bristlecone pine gnarled by wind, a trail left by fearful migrants, or the great plenitude of birds that come into her ken, Levinson’s poems survey our vanishing world with a sharp eye, an open heart, and a willingness to see the humor even in our shared human folly. Before It All Vanishes is a generous book, wide-ranging and formally varied but unified throughout by Levinson’s affectionate attentiveness to all things.

–John Brehm, author of Help Is on the Way 

As its title suggests, Lois Levinson’s Before It All Vanishes, witnesses to our evanescent world in all its danger and absurdity, its sadness and wonder.  Levinson’s acute perception parts the veils of our daily preoccupations so that “ordinary objects/appear extraordinary.” Levinson creates a poetics of the shifting ecosystems of thought, taking the reader to “a time before/you took/human shape” and marking out “a constellation/of color and motion” that stitches webs across the disparate fragments of experience.  This is a poetry of recognitions, a poetry that can read the story in the trail and lead us to a place where we are untethered and free.

–Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts