Forget about Sleep
Forget about Sleep
by Miriam Levine
NYQ Books, 2024
2023 Winner, the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award
Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk, EIL Poetry Editor
I knew from the very first poem, “Deeper, Darker,” that Forget about Sleep, by Miriam Levine, was my kind of book. It is full of poems with great specificity of image and marvelous emotional restraint. Late in the book comes this stanza, from the poem “You Ask Yourself”:
You think it may be time to leave your old self,
not like the Carmelites who take a vow of silence,
a new name and pray day and night for the world,
but something like them, someone who speaks less.
I’ve been noticing that need in myself, for a departure of some sort, for an important decision, but if Levine has already made it, it seems she is speaking exactly the right amount, in mostly brief poems where less is assuredly more. And one thing she is saying, insistently, is, “We’re not done with love.”
The speaker of the poems is mostly an older woman looking back on life, remembering past (or imagined) lovers, feeling the spark of desire, honest about change, resurrecting the dead…but once, in “Cardinal,” is a red bird seeing such a woman, “white / hair like floss” pouring out sunflower seeds for him. Ah, is that the poet leaving her old self?
She sees so much: “a spider like a crochet / stitch on the pillow edge,” a “street splotched with gold,” a stone statue’s knee “like a giant peony,” and “daffodils…dripping from the bucket.” Her past, her world, her observations burst into life on each page.
I love her titles: “Blue of Provence,” “Small Hotels,” “No One Has To.” I love her commands: “Forget / your unimportance.” I love her radical acceptance, in a poem called “Exclusion” and in the last line of “Night at Admiral Towers”: “I give in, I give in to the quiet streaming inside of me.” And I love her defiance, as in the retelling of “The Story of Daphne,” where a mythological father saves his daughter from rape by turning her into a laurel tree; in my notes, summarized as, “Stop him, not me!” If only! Yes, we do need the Carmelites to keep praying for the world.
It’s a beautiful book, going out into the world as a “paper boat” in the last poem, “Envoi.” You’ll want to read it, to watch it “[f]loat on the brimming stream” until it is gone…
Miriam Levine in Dog Days 2025 at EIL
Forget about Sleep at NYQ Books
Forget about Sleep at Miriam Levine’s Website
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