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Barataria Poetry Series
Ordinary Psalms
Struggling to accept her impending blindness, the speaker in Julia B. Levine's fifth collection of poetry, Ordinary Psalms, asks everyday life to help her learn how to see beyond appearances into fundamental truths.
As she contemplates the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide, along with her own visual impairment, Levine holds the world "close as I needed / to see." Imagistic, lyrical, and at times imploring divine intervention from a god she does not know or trust, these poems curse and praise the extraordinary place we live in and are in danger of losing. Lamenting that "this world is a mortal affliction / with wounds in the beautiful," Ordinary Psalms provides a seductive and lyric rumination on radiance, loss, and grief.
As she contemplates the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide, along with her own visual impairment, Levine holds the world "close as I needed / to see." Imagistic, lyrical, and at times imploring divine intervention from a god she does not know or trust, these poems curse and praise the extraordinary place we live in and are in danger of losing. Lamenting that "this world is a mortal affliction / with wounds in the beautiful," Ordinary Psalms provides a seductive and lyric rumination on radiance, loss, and grief.
- GenresPoetry
100 pages, Paperback
Published March 3, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 8, 2025
Catch and Release
The oak and willow flare
until it seems fire is unsayable--
a river of late autumn light.
A half mile in, we kneel.
Gregory's hands unlatch the cage
he has carried from home.
The rat tenses at the threshold,
quivering. Around us, I watch the ponds
give back dusk singed incarnadine and blue.
Here in his last November,
before he steps off that building into the sky,
I think nothing of it
when he whispers, Go on now, it's okay,
the wild animal leaping then into risk,
into the struggled, starless dark.
Julia B. Levine's collection Ordinary Psalms are anything but "ordinary." Examining how she is losing her sight while grieving for friends she has lost to suicide or cancer of good friends, one would expect her poetry to be maudlin. But, to repeat: anything but. Levine maintains hope and beauty throughout the collection--there is sadness, sure, but there are also moments of profundity and peace. With her verse, she evokes landscapes of amazing clarity while mining the depths of emotion with an observant, compassionate eye.
Levine is a first-rate poet whose work I definitely want to explore further. Highly recommended.
The Anointing
All morning, the ordinary
has been filled with light. Now
a woman crosses the street, her cart
stuffed with clothes, an electrical cord
dragging behind. Her face is dirty
as a child's, her hair greasy
under her pink bandanna. She stares
hard into my eyes. Announces,
You are a god I could love.
Stars-of-Bethlehem float over the lawn
and further up the greenbelt, a teenaged couple
roller-skate, one in a dress with a white sash
where wings might have been.
Even the garbage truck reaches out
its mechanical hand with such precision,
the dogs on the sidewalk lie down in praise.
I continue on, past the poppies toppled over
with radiance. Still helpless as any god
to keep my friend on the next block
from dying slowly of cancer.
All we will ever have of divinity
is each other. And a wind
rushing down from the blue sky
cut into the exact shape
of the body
I am walking through.
The oak and willow flare
until it seems fire is unsayable--
a river of late autumn light.
A half mile in, we kneel.
Gregory's hands unlatch the cage
he has carried from home.
The rat tenses at the threshold,
quivering. Around us, I watch the ponds
give back dusk singed incarnadine and blue.
Here in his last November,
before he steps off that building into the sky,
I think nothing of it
when he whispers, Go on now, it's okay,
the wild animal leaping then into risk,
into the struggled, starless dark.
Julia B. Levine's collection Ordinary Psalms are anything but "ordinary." Examining how she is losing her sight while grieving for friends she has lost to suicide or cancer of good friends, one would expect her poetry to be maudlin. But, to repeat: anything but. Levine maintains hope and beauty throughout the collection--there is sadness, sure, but there are also moments of profundity and peace. With her verse, she evokes landscapes of amazing clarity while mining the depths of emotion with an observant, compassionate eye.
Levine is a first-rate poet whose work I definitely want to explore further. Highly recommended.
The Anointing
All morning, the ordinary
has been filled with light. Now
a woman crosses the street, her cart
stuffed with clothes, an electrical cord
dragging behind. Her face is dirty
as a child's, her hair greasy
under her pink bandanna. She stares
hard into my eyes. Announces,
You are a god I could love.
Stars-of-Bethlehem float over the lawn
and further up the greenbelt, a teenaged couple
roller-skate, one in a dress with a white sash
where wings might have been.
Even the garbage truck reaches out
its mechanical hand with such precision,
the dogs on the sidewalk lie down in praise.
I continue on, past the poppies toppled over
with radiance. Still helpless as any god
to keep my friend on the next block
from dying slowly of cancer.
All we will ever have of divinity
is each other. And a wind
rushing down from the blue sky
cut into the exact shape
of the body
I am walking through.
September 13, 2025
New favorite poet alert!
I stumbled across this collection in a Bainbridge bookshop, hidden on the bottom shelf of the poetry section, where I waited a while for a couple and a goth girl to finish perusing. Begun while camping, reading to my friends by the lake, I think I recognized a piece of myself in Levine’s story, and what are words but to help us feel less alone?
Levine weaves past, present, and future with seamless lines, something I aspire to in my own writing when everything in the world seems connected to everything else. She demonstrates incredible restraint in the details she discloses or keeps hidden, drawing on childhood and adult experiences to make sense of loss and hope. As a reader, I always felt tied to the ground. I never felt like I was losing the narrator of each poem.
Her way of seeing is not something I often encounter with contemporary poets. And she translates that seeing into the most astonishing assemblage of words. See, for example:
- “voice-box hallelujah”
- “the cold chapel of his disgust”
- “prayerful knit of the pines”
- “star frost bedded in clover”
- “blood smell of sunlight”
- “candled with pollen”
- “a village of names”
- “syntax of sleep”
- “savage path of beauty”
Levine taps on such an array of emotions in her work. My jaw just kept dropping.
I stumbled across this collection in a Bainbridge bookshop, hidden on the bottom shelf of the poetry section, where I waited a while for a couple and a goth girl to finish perusing. Begun while camping, reading to my friends by the lake, I think I recognized a piece of myself in Levine’s story, and what are words but to help us feel less alone?
Levine weaves past, present, and future with seamless lines, something I aspire to in my own writing when everything in the world seems connected to everything else. She demonstrates incredible restraint in the details she discloses or keeps hidden, drawing on childhood and adult experiences to make sense of loss and hope. As a reader, I always felt tied to the ground. I never felt like I was losing the narrator of each poem.
Her way of seeing is not something I often encounter with contemporary poets. And she translates that seeing into the most astonishing assemblage of words. See, for example:
- “voice-box hallelujah”
- “the cold chapel of his disgust”
- “prayerful knit of the pines”
- “star frost bedded in clover”
- “blood smell of sunlight”
- “candled with pollen”
- “a village of names”
- “syntax of sleep”
- “savage path of beauty”
Levine taps on such an array of emotions in her work. My jaw just kept dropping.
April 16, 2021
In Levine’s gorgeous and moving collection, structured in seamless sections with great care and exquisite craft, she braids modern psalms on memory, devastating personal loss (her progressive loss of sight, close friends) with both tender renderings on nature/landscape (particularly of California’s Central Valley) and painfully honest ones about family, death, God, and daily life, all without an ounce of saccharin. The resounding mediations on doubt, sorrow, and despair are beautifully buoyed with reverence and revelation. Her language and imagery throughout is staggering and inventive, describing the everyday with vividness and turns that require re-reading after one’s astonishment has settled. “Already the shadows thrown down/their lean graves across the bluffs.”
As the poet’s sight diminishes, her vignette shrinking (“a blurred unseaming of each from each/into a great sameness”), an interior aperture widens and we are grateful for every line and image that leaves the reader simultaneously heart-wrenched and heart-healed, asking the question what does it really mean to see? An extraordinary poetry collection that no review can do justice – you must simply read it, continuously recommend, and return to often. “And yet this is what it sounds like/when a woman refuses to look away.”
As the poet’s sight diminishes, her vignette shrinking (“a blurred unseaming of each from each/into a great sameness”), an interior aperture widens and we are grateful for every line and image that leaves the reader simultaneously heart-wrenched and heart-healed, asking the question what does it really mean to see? An extraordinary poetry collection that no review can do justice – you must simply read it, continuously recommend, and return to often. “And yet this is what it sounds like/when a woman refuses to look away.”
April 9, 2023
Achingly beautiful. Putting the music to my feelings with such reverence and originality. I am deeply grateful to have these poems to red again and again.
April 18, 2021
In Levine’s gorgeous and moving collection, structured in seamless sections with great care and exquisite craft, she braids modern psalms on memory, devastating personal loss (her progressive loss of sight, close friends) with both tender renderings on nature/landscape (particularly of California’s Central Valley) and painfully honest ones about family, death, God, and daily life, all without an ounce of saccharin. The resounding mediations on doubt, sorrow, and despair are beautifully buoyed with reverence and revelation. Her language and imagery throughout is staggering and inventive, describing the everyday with vividness and turns that require re-reading after one’s astonishment has settled. “Already the shadows thrown down/their lean graves across the bluffs.”
As the poet’s sight diminishes, her vignette shrinking (“a blurred unseaming of each from each/into a great sameness”), an interior aperture widens and we are grateful for every line and image that leaves the reader simultaneously heart-wrenched and heart-healed, asking the question what does it really mean to see? An extraordinary poetry collection that no review can do justice – you must simply read it, continuously recommend, and return to often. “And yet this is what it sounds like/when a woman refuses to look away.”
As the poet’s sight diminishes, her vignette shrinking (“a blurred unseaming of each from each/into a great sameness”), an interior aperture widens and we are grateful for every line and image that leaves the reader simultaneously heart-wrenched and heart-healed, asking the question what does it really mean to see? An extraordinary poetry collection that no review can do justice – you must simply read it, continuously recommend, and return to often. “And yet this is what it sounds like/when a woman refuses to look away.”
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews