Books

Now In Contest (Fernwood Press, 2023)

With Now in Contest Richard Levine claims a place among America’s essential voices.

Martin Buber said, “we can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves”. Elusive redemption, hinged on the unending struggle to recognize our neighbors truthfully-–that’s at the core of Levine’s vision. His poems are “I-Thou” to the marrow-–which, in America, means they tackle war, racism, climate privilege. Levine speaks with Whitmanesque directness (though perhaps not Whitmanesque optimism) to the reader, to Buddy Holley, to a student in Bushwick.

His voice can bridge unfathomable distances … Now in Contest is a book I will treasure and return to.
–D. Nurkse, Love in the Last Days; A Country of Strangers, New and Selected Poems

Richard Levine: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2019)

“While poets tend to be many things in their lives as they live them, they tend to cut a certain figure in their poetry. … If there is such a figure in Levine’s poetry, I would propose Odysseus, … Not the warrior in the Iliad, nor the veteran in the Odyssey wending his way back to Ithaca. Rather, Odysseus, long since in the safe harbor of home, grateful for the life he now has … and yet still haunted (though not paralyzed) by all that Homer had described. … How then to preserve the world he now so much loves, having once been caught up in its destruction. (“ … When wind blows across … this meadow, / it pipes a lead-steady, bassoon-like note Odysseus might have known, / crossing the fearsome universe between war and home. …”
Carl Rosenstock, The Mystery of Systems

Contiguous States (Finishing Line Press, 2018)

“If one doesn’t find oneself tearing up at least once while reading Richard Levine’s Contiguous States, it seems—to me, at least—that one is lacking in humanity. There are poems of immense sadness and poems of immense beauty, poems that expose the soul of man for all to see. I find myself going back to reread poem after poem here—not because I need to be reminded of sadness or beauty, but because that which is deeply human must be held close, cherished.”
Matthew J. Spireng, What Focus Is and Out of Body

The Cadence of Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2014)

”Richard Levine’s poems encapsulate dualities. The Cadence of Mercy whispers at and emphasizes the splendors within family, growing up where “we lived American lives,/playing American sports and huddling on fire” – but these poems also expose the harshest experiences of life: war, loss and death. Levine voices his realities, and they are wonders and despairs that are universal.”
Leah Maines, Publisher, Finishing Line Press

A Tide of a Hundred Mountains (2012 Bright Hill Press Chapbook Contest winner)

“For days now, through all of this horror taking place in MO (referring to cop shooting of unarmed Black youth), I’ve been trying to remember the title (“Picket Fences”) of (your) poem … about a little black girl waiting at the door of her white friend, but not invited in. (It) had the same effect—maybe even stronger this time than the first time I read it. Extraordinary poem! It invited me to go through that entire little gem of a book again. And … that devastating “A Mother Welcomes a Son Home from War …” and the other poems about war, both experienced and remembered.
These are poems that need to be read and reread right now, when so many are straining at the bit to send off young people to die in one more war, and nothing seems to be changing on the racism front.”
Rhina Espaillat, And After All, Rehearsing Absence, winner Richard Wilbur Award

That Country’s Soul (Finishing Line Press, 2018)

“And if I hear my name/ringing out of these woods/I will rise through this loneliness/and be nourished by the call’ writes Richard Levine in his austerely beautiful new book THAT COUNTRY’S SOUL. I think of Chief Seattle’s observation that, if all the animals were gone, humans would die of “a great loneliness of the spirit.” For this is Levine’s burden: to posit a relationship to nature when there may be no time “except for goodbyes.” The forest he has created in these pages is mythic, but the poet enters it humbly, with “pine pegs and a spool of twine” and with a task that is profoundly urgent and transcendent. This is a lovely collection, and to me, in the subtlest of ways, a call to environmental action.”
D. Nurkse. Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult, Border Kingdom, Burnt Island

A Language Full of Wars and Songs (Pollack Press, 2004)

“Richard Levine is a seasoned word-respondent. From the fragility of nature … to the war-world of his “Mud-Walking” poems, always he sings a polished tune, at time elegiac or with light playfulness, but always with intelligence flaming in it.”
James Ragan, The Chanter’s Reed, The World Shouldering I, Too Long a Solitude
“… (Levine’s) poems amaze me. I feel the air stutter, see rain turn to rice, feel the abrupt distillation down to “the father I am today.” Thank you for this book.”
Kim Stafford, Wild Honey, Tough Salt, Early Mornings

Snapshots from a Battle (Headwaters Press, 2000) – limited edition chapbook

Was she there to think, to pray … excerpt,
All books available from publisher, except A Language Full of Wars and Songs
and Snapshots from a Battle
Books also available through Amazon Author Page