Focus - Softcover

Lev, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1630450367 ISBN 13: 9781630450366

Publisher: NYQ Books, 2017

Synopsis

Focus is a collection of poems by Donald Lev written for the most part after 2012, and is intended as a sequel to his collection published that year by NYQ Books, A Very Funny Fellow, whose concluding poem, "This Big Window," imagines needing a telescope. The heavens, it seems to the author "are seriously overgrown" like his "neglected yard," "his sluggish imagination," and his "boxloads of books and neuroses." From this point, Focus struggles bravely, and perhaps blindly, on.

About this title

About the Author

Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and New York Times, and then drove a taxi cab for 20 years (with a 6-year hiatus in which he ran messages for, and contributed poetry to, The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). His earliest poems appeared in print in 1958 and he started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology, in 1969. Among his honors have been a Madeline Sadin Award from New York Quarterly in 1973 and a Life Time Achievement Award from the Catskill Reading Society/Outloudbooks in 2003. He was Distinguished Visiting Poet for the Northeast Poetry Center in Sugar Loaf, NY in July of 2012. In 2008 Outloudbooks brought out his The Darkness Above: Selected Poems 1968-2002 a sampling from the first four decades of his writing. A chapbook, Only Wings: 20 Poems of Devotion was published in 2010 by Presa Press in Michigan, and a new collection, A Very Funny Fellow, was brought out by NYQ Books in February, 2012. His most recent book, Where I Sit, was published by Presa Press in 2015. His brief underground film-acting career pinnacled with his portrayal (he wrote his own lines) of "The Poet" in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1969 classic Putney Swope. He lives in High Falls, NY, where he publishes the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which he and his late wife Enid Dame founded in 1979.

Edition details

• Publisher: NYQ Books
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1630450367
• ISBN 13: 9781630450366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136