Nothing is in Here, by Andrew Levy

EOAGH Books, 2011
ISBN 978-0-578-05882-5
Poetry / Fiction / Literature
82 Pages
$17

In this poet’s novella, midtown Manhattan unrolls into a parade of grotesque but sympathetic speakers who confront us in partial narratives with no overriding story except onwardness. Poems bloom inside of prose passages which get interrupted by journalistic account related to the credit crisis and wars overseas. A series series of dramatic monologues without authorial selves, this book is loosely organized by an intelligence and an embodied understanding not unlike a political conscience. Levy writes to find out what living in the worlds of allegory and irony means, and what the cost of doing business there while tending one’s life might be. We can’t mistake his interest in intimacy and beauty.

Praise for Nothing is in Here:

“This book percolates with the nervous jitters of a new syntax, highly compressed into gigabyte format, and it attacks the central nervous system of the reader. In my day it used to be ‘dudes,’ but today it’s all the young screens that carry the news. . If, due to a saturation of such memes, the fact of the sentence has lost urgency, maybe it’s the job of the poet to point out what we’ve lost while instructing us in the delight of our debris. No one demonstrates this fact of digital life better than poet Andrew Levy, whose first EOAGH collection arrives at a critical moment in our nation’s horologics. If you could synchronize this book to all your inner clocks, you’d be a good forty-five seconds ahead of the rest of the world at all times.”

– Kevin Killian

“With barely concealed irony, downright humor, a large wedge of anger and a small edge of wistfulness, Andrew Levy views everything from the ‘urban interruption’ of mid-town Manhattan to the corrupt politics of G.W. Bush, from war and torture to religiosity and outright mendacity. There’s more: invented personae, pop culture, the bubble economy, friends and family, beauty and envy. Even the Brooklyn Bridge makes an appearance. Just about everything is in Nothing is in Here. And the title itself is a bright lure: ‘Nothing is in here we’ re forced to debate.’ The terms are given in the beginning: ‘Nothing is in here. So, I make it look as different as possible.'”

– Beverly Dahlen

REVIEWS:

Review of Nothing is in Here by Steve Benson at Jacket2

Review of Nothing is in Here by Matt Reeck at Cutback Poetry

Review of Nothing is in Here by Robert Mueller at Blackbox Manifold

Thomas Fink interviews Andrew Levy on Nothing is in Here at The Conversant.

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