A Review of the 2024 Award-Winning Book ‘Forget About Sleep’

“An homage to eros in new poetry collection,”
by Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe, May 2024

“I love bodily things,” writes poet Miriam Levine in her latest collection, Forget about Sleep (NYQ Books). That love — reverence, attraction, curiosity — is apparent in her lines and in between them.

I like her attention on the male body, “the oblique muscles and swelling sex.” Elsewhere, she sees a man who looks like a Greek statue, like a figure arriving from Crete to a small town where “an old woman like me/ would say she had seen/ a god.”

Of remembering a first lover, she writes, “His head is turned to the side, angling/ toward his shoulder as if he were shy being/ so dead.” The vital force of aliveness, eros, desire, pleasure (“why would/ you ever want to leave the earth?”), rub shoulder-to-shoulder with mortality, our candle quick to be blown out, or, perhaps more aptly here, all of us flowers quick to bloom and quick to fade.

For Levine, the floral, the arboreal, count as bodily things, too, the marigolds and roses, witch hazel, laurel, and lilacs. Sunset’s fleeting blaze carries the same force, “a long pink slit … turned/ fruity, darker, lit like wine/ held to fire.” Charged in its changing, in its total temporariness, in the great pleasure, so acute, so fast.

Levine, the first poet laureate of Arlington, who lives part-time in New Hampshire, honors the flesh, which is to say, the human — how lucky we are, to have senses, skin, the confusion of want, to know an “eely tongue” and the “spice of lilacs.” To be alive and feel “a stinging sweetness fill me/ with desire that had no object.”

Miriam Levine’s Forget About Sleep is the
2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award winner.