Vespers

“Jane Lewty transforms the ancient ritual of evening prayer into a searching, contemporary art of attention. Through antiphons, hymns, and restless meditations, she threads together city light and basilica shadow, art history and automatons, dread and devotion, asking what it means to persist—on the bench, in the hour, within the sentence. These poems are intellectually agile and lyrically electric. Radiant, restless, and formally daring, Vespers makes twilight an aperture where language itself becomes a form of necessary vigil.”—Peter Gizzi, author, Fierce Elegy

“This careening, language-rich text asks what devotional, ritual, or practiced habit causes—invokes—the body, self, or soul to become self-legible, to ‘enter the actual present.’ This masterful project unfolds as a series of poetic, investigative responses to algorithmic commands orbiting around liturgical, calendrical, devotional, and sexual practice. What, here, is being divined? With excruciating, particular/particulate attention to the body as a lightning rod to presence, as erotic and philosophic filament amidst a certain unease of noise, of hour notation, of city streets, of memory, history, and wheeling cosmos, Jane Lewty iterates and reiterates a self toward sensation, toward mind’s body’s felt awareness, physical presence emplaced on the plane between the heavens—the weather, the solar system, a lurking sense of sacrament, and something else, Baltimore’s intersections, daily living’s domestic objects, the incessant ticking of hours, the sartorial, viewed self; a body pinned there as da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is pinned, or as an insect, a butterfly, might be pinned. Lewty builds with fine-tuned language a phenomenological, conceptual world in which her two directives—to ‘be an elaborate robot. be a full-blooded body’—are not in opposition, and in their poetic conjoining reach for something tethered to the divine, but anchored here, in each particulate, noticed instant.”—Cody-Rose Clevidence, author, This Household of Earthly Nature