The Braid
Krupskaya Books, 2016
Purchase from Small Press Distribution or Amazon
Winner of the 2016 SFSU Poetry Center Poetry Book Award
THE BRAID is a fever dream of pregnancy and early parenting in the era of the police state. Meditative and urgent, it interrogates the idealized portrait of mother and child to wind up somewhere much messier. A love poem shot through with ambivalence; a sustained fuck–you to Ronald Reagan and his legacy; a moment of feminist possibility on the far side of collapse.
"I eat crumbs out of the baby's neck / I'm glad there are no great poems by women / I'm glad there are no great poems by Jews / I'm glad there are no great poems about motherhood / I'm glad no great poems have ever been written."
Praise for The Braid
Lauren Levin’s The Braid is a beautiful entry into the counter-tradition of poems about the work of motherhood, a tradition which — in Bernadette Mayer, in Alice Notley — is also always about politics. So often, to usher young life into the world is to fear for that life, and to defy that world. This is a politicizing dilemma, and a challenge for poetic style: how do you give shape to the conundrum of anxiety and courage, of anger and solicitude, to which childrearing gives rise? Levin chooses a loose but grounded meditative line that can build into long stanzas or drift into single strophes, and this flexibility allows us to experience both pained contraction and gorgeous expansion, by turns. It is written, as Levin tells us, by a child of the Reagan era; it is a triumph over what that era wanted us to become. —Chris Nealon
The Braid is like some vines I’ve known, doing the demi-impossible and messing up forever what was once “inside” or “out.” You’re sure a wall is a wall and next thing you know, something as gentle as a tendril has pried open that place you thought you could never leave. —Anne Boyer
The Braid is a long-awaited letter from a far-flung comrade, a sibling in the struggle. Lauren Levin’s voice is a clear day on which you can see forever, with a purifying breeze and wildflowers and good bugs busy all over the place. I wanted it to never end. —Elisa Alberti
