Poetry. This second edition, printed a decade after NEIGHBOR's original publication, features an expanded version of the play, "Perfect California: A Family Affair." NEIGHBOR's mutable, shifty narrator alternately reifies and attempts to refuse the constricting, separating, culture-load bearing wall between lovers and neighbors. As antagonisms and intimacies converge, Levitsky troubles the divisions within urban space, and between spatial and ethical frames: "I live on a street where / people turn (on) each other / into a theory."
"In her second full-length collection, Levitsky challenges readers with an expansive sequence of poems that vigorously dissemble and reassemble notions of what a poem is and does [ ... ] A decisively innovative book; NEIGHBOR is brimming with sharply reported discoveries."--
Publishers Weekly.
"NEIGHBOR is a sweet saga of disconnection. A collectivity of loss. Rachel should be working for the city of New York. 'I've decided to use my obsession/with my neighbor as the context/ for a discussion of the State.' That in itself is incredible."--Eileen Myles.
"In and outside the window of Rachel Levitsky's apartment lie sadness, amusement and conflicted regard for the weirdo constructs of faith and scum politics. Her poet energy is a sweet intellect with lazy compulsive lines dropping onto a free and wishful page, ok with semi-resolve amidst the minor clatter of daily lust."--Thurston Moore.