So Long

by Jen Levitt

Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt’s So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. “Soon,” she says, “we’ll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow.” In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt’s speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling “in their sweat-resistant fabrics,” “so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time”; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers “no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare.” It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title’s idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable look at this, she seems to command herself, “& look at how lucky I’ve been, for so long.”

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 15, 2023

Reviews

[Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is so underrated!! I’m so glad I randomly stumbled across a copy of this at the bookstore yesterday. I read it all in one sitting.

Levitt’s writing is super accessible with restrained language & familiar subject matter (think scenes from the life of a 30 something in NYC) — its novelty really comes from how she wields those to so precisely articulate these searing truths about love, grief, the human condition. Seemed a bit Marie Howe-esque to me

My fav was probably “Intimacy” where she imagines telling her recently deceased father about seeing a woman pass out on the Q train: “…all week I wanted to talk to you / about this small sad thing, the woman’s purse / at her side, hands trembling like my horse / at the stream, while we looked & kept / walking, these details that make up a life / & could help you know me.” Beautiful