Phillis Levin

Phillis Levin has published four books of poetry, including Mercury (Penguin, 2001) and May Day (Penguin, 2008), and is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Her honors include the Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her fifth collection, Mr. Memory & Other Poems, is forthcoming from Penguin in April 2016. She teaches at Hofstra University and lives in New York.

2015

Demitasse

By Phillis Levin | January 14, 2015

You evaded the fire-storm, reaching the shore / Of the New World long before, so nothing / To speak of has shaken you more than the rage / In my father’s voice or my brother’s infant fist / Shattering a pane of the china closet, leaving you / Unharmed (the shards swept away, the glass / Replaced in a day).