Justice Piece// Transmission
Purchase from Nightboat Books or Amazon
Timeless, Infinite Light / Nightboat 2018
Justice Piece // Transmission is a perverse and anxious attack on the concept of justice, asking “If I am the symptom, what is the cause?” Ranging from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to feminist sci-fi, gendered violence to Led Zeppelin, disciplinary heterosexuality to hypochondria, these twin poems tackle questions of how personal history and pop culture build us up and tear us to shreds. Levin’s writing lives in a space of contradiction, a call to “Make everything ugly / No aesthetics left / no mysteries / only problems.”
Praise for Justice Piece // Transmission
Lauren Levin wrestles with the impossible in Justice Piece // Transmission: white supremacy, gender, the medical establishment, anxiety, ethnicity, mothering, sexuality, family, revolution … It’s all there. And Levin manages to win this match against the impossible, writing a new form of confessionalism that is at moments shocking, at other moments moving, and yet always attentive to the responsibilities of care for the world larger than the self. A stunning book. —Juliana Spahr
Lauren Levin’s book takes its rightful place besides recent ones bby Bhanu Kapil and Chris Nealon, as poetry of real essayistic inquiry and open, immediate life writing. Half in lines, and half in prose paragraphs, this work of bodied intellection and rigorous self-assessment operates also as a compelling daybook that sorts and processes both the onrush of terrible American news and the repositioning developments of the author’s new motherhood. The whole thing pulses with living, ongoing thinking. —Brian Blanchfield
Not since college have I read a book that began with the question: “What is justice?” In college, the book was Plato’s Republic, where I learned about ‘the noble lie’. There is no ‘noble lie’ in Lauren Levin’s Justice Piece//Transmission. There is no answer to the question “What is justice?” Instead, the question leads in unexpected directions, to more questions. But while Levin can’t tell readers what justice is, the book isn’t leading them into a post-modern rabbit hole, either. Levin’s questions usefully uncover what justice isn’t, which is the most honest way to start. This is the kind of book that years from now, when I find myself in one quandary or another, I will think about, pick up and read again. —Wendy Trevino
