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Levitations
Navigating the subtle ways language (con)forms the body, Levitations spans childhood, community, and love to explore how we might break free from the cultural demands of normalcy. Imagined as “a preface for the work to come," Levitations unfolds like a sketchbook of emergent architectures, valuing queer hope in a time of vertically integrated and insidiously embodied imperialist rule.
Praise for Levitations
To stain the wall the room the city the cry language the bodies blanked out. To leave a trace to refuse to be invisible. “Because the earth, in its twirl, lacks the energy to continue dying.” To give this energy to the earth to help it die and live differently. “I will be your smudge” says JH Phrydas in this beautiful invitation to join him in the shapeshifting the stain begins to suggest past “ the revulsion of 10,000 eyes” towards a new type “of longing, another form to tremble near”. For anyone who has ever felt personal and political shame and where those two meet in the death and bondage on the floor. The rare chance to levitate above it, with it.
Melissa Buzzeo
JH Phrydas is a poet who brutally pins his hopes on the sun and moon to come. If neoliberalism is the enemy of our utopian longings, Levitations refuses to be stuck: “With a hatchet, I could fuck this floor up. I could hack a hole through which to pull him, up into her warmth.” Pushing against its own elegance, this writing moves by the light of incipience as shed only and ever at the limits of the self, demanding a collectivity where the “receiving body itself dissolved.”
Lucas de Lima
Unmoored from fated constellations of gender and state, Levitations moves like an insurgent star across the uncharted skies of a fugitive queer communism. In spare and elegant phrasing—“words wrapped around empty space to contain / a figure”—JH Phrydas enacts an odyssey of transfiguration, using its lines to build new architectures for nonviolent habitation. From discotheque to city street, this book wrests the body away from social cruelty, “truthful to the point of breaking.”
Rob Halpern
Praise for Levitations
To stain the wall the room the city the cry language the bodies blanked out. To leave a trace to refuse to be invisible. “Because the earth, in its twirl, lacks the energy to continue dying.” To give this energy to the earth to help it die and live differently. “I will be your smudge” says JH Phrydas in this beautiful invitation to join him in the shapeshifting the stain begins to suggest past “ the revulsion of 10,000 eyes” towards a new type “of longing, another form to tremble near”. For anyone who has ever felt personal and political shame and where those two meet in the death and bondage on the floor. The rare chance to levitate above it, with it.
Melissa Buzzeo
JH Phrydas is a poet who brutally pins his hopes on the sun and moon to come. If neoliberalism is the enemy of our utopian longings, Levitations refuses to be stuck: “With a hatchet, I could fuck this floor up. I could hack a hole through which to pull him, up into her warmth.” Pushing against its own elegance, this writing moves by the light of incipience as shed only and ever at the limits of the self, demanding a collectivity where the “receiving body itself dissolved.”
Lucas de Lima
Unmoored from fated constellations of gender and state, Levitations moves like an insurgent star across the uncharted skies of a fugitive queer communism. In spare and elegant phrasing—“words wrapped around empty space to contain / a figure”—JH Phrydas enacts an odyssey of transfiguration, using its lines to build new architectures for nonviolent habitation. From discotheque to city street, this book wrests the body away from social cruelty, “truthful to the point of breaking.”
Rob Halpern
- GenresPoetry
114 pages, Paperback
First published November 17, 2015
184 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 2, 2019
One of the most inaccessible things I’ve ever tried to read. At least it was sad and gay.
February 7, 2021
I read each section of this book three times in an effort to connect pieces and get inside Phrydas’ meanings.
I was moved my the first section, and gained more about language, material histories and politics, and queer embodiment each time I read. There were some poignant phrases in the third section, but it didn’t come together as well as the beginning. The middle section lost me, as I couldn’t often track the processes and circuits between ideas sewn together.
I may write more and note a few good lines later.
I was moved my the first section, and gained more about language, material histories and politics, and queer embodiment each time I read. There were some poignant phrases in the third section, but it didn’t come together as well as the beginning. The middle section lost me, as I couldn’t often track the processes and circuits between ideas sewn together.
I may write more and note a few good lines later.
Want to read
November 19, 2015I won this book via Goodreads First Reads Giveaway. I received a paperback copy.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews