Books
I write stories to see where my characters’ personalities will take them.
I write poems to describe and honor little pieces of the world.
-Lynn Levin
“House Parties offers the wisdom and humor of a keen eye and a kind heart. Lynn Levin writes beautiful prose so skilled that it seems unselfconscious while being replete with perfectly balanced sentences, brilliant metaphors, and similes. Levin’s spirited imagination is a delight. These stories are amusing, startling, poignant, heartwarming. House Parties is a book to read, savor and return to again.”
–The Massachusetts Review
“A collection of vivid, funny, and quietly powerful short stories. House Parties may break your heart, but it’ll never do it the same way twice.”
–Philadelphia Magazine
“A tour de force. There are too few recent story collections today with House Parties‘ ambition to jump between generations, cities, points-of-view, character occupations, and narrative pacing styles. All in all, House Parties is not to be missed. It’s not often you read a story about three millennial guys hiking, followed by a story of Jewish Americans in the latter half of the 20th century.”
–Painted Bride Quarterly
“House Parties is a triumph of compassion, potent perfection, and unforgettable stories. An
enormous collection of short stories that seemingly takes five minutes to read. You go back and
reread. The stories exert their spells all over again.”
-Write Now Philly
“A collection of twenty beautifully crafted short stories.”
–NewPages
“In the short stories of Lynn Levin’s wry, tragicomic collection House Parties, some people struggle; others behave badly. Morality balances on a precipice in the lingering short stories of House Parties, which are unflinching in exposing how people sometimes know what’s right, but still choose to do otherwise.”
–Foreword Reviews
"The stories in House Parties are full of anguished souls and restless hearts, which Lynn Levin examines with the beauty and precision of a poet. I felt the spirit of Poe hovering around these tales, though the sensibility here is entirely modern and original. Levin’s characters search relentlessly—for connection, meaning, even revenge—in ways I couldn’t help but recognize as lifted directly from my life. Wonderful. "
-Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World
-Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World
“Lynn Levin is my favorite kind of writer—honest, specific, real, funny, but never cynical. House Parties is a collection that sees the world with perfect clarity and cherishes it all the same.”
-Megan Angelo, author of Followers
“These crisply written, sharply observed stories have the surprising hallmark of having mostly gentle, if not outright happy, endings. The turn from dark possibility to lighter conclusion is a welcome relief in our difficult times. Levin affirms something basically positive about the human condition.”
-Paula Marantz Cohen, author of Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation
Available wherever books are sold or…
"Lynn Levin’s The Minor Virtues is such a lovely honoring of the small, the minor sweetnesses that life is made of."
-Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy and The Book of Delights
-Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy and The Book of Delights
The Minor Virtues is listed as one of Spring 2020's best books by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
"She's a poet whose often quirky poems may start small but always invite you to a journey worth taking."
–The Philadelphia Inquirer
"She's a poet whose often quirky poems may start small but always invite you to a journey worth taking."
–The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Lynn Levin has taken some minor virtues—and a good deal else besides—and turned it all into major poetry."
–The Hopkins Review
–The Hopkins Review
"Lynn Levin's The Minor Virtues aims to notice and portray the beauty of the world through all the seemingly mundane objects and small kindnesses that make life more enjoyable. Many of the poems either praise or lament the loss of something from the past, whether it be table etiquette—in the poem ‘On Knowing One's Goblet at the Banquet Table’—or the good old days of handwritten letters and cards—in ‘Writing in Longhand.’ In ‘Lilith, the Scribe’ and ‘Lilith Tries Online Dating,’ Levin relies on both Midrash and humor to imagine Lilith trying to write her own story down for future generations. Levin's observations of the minor pleasures in life, enhanced by her use of rhyme and humor, make The Minor Virtues a very enjoyable read."
–Jewish Book Council
–Jewish Book Council
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A Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Poetry
“In this accessible, outrageous, entertaining book, Lilith and Eve appear in funny, Rabelaisian poems that take place during shopping at the mall or strolls in the garden. Miss Plastique is fun, thought provoking, and paradoxical—an excellent read for anyone interested in the difficulties of existing as a modern and/or historical woman.”
–Rain Taxi: Review of Books
“Levin writes with ferocious tenacity, all arterial memory, lust, found power, and raw regret like you imagine a Miss Plastique would be if she were real.”
–Cleaver
“The poet’s signature, razor-sharp wit and critical eye toward contemporary life give way to an underlying reverence for the tenderness and vulnerability of the human heart. Lynn Levin’s poetry exhibits sophisticated craft and clear-eyed passion, yet never at the expense of hard truths and life’s conundrums.”
–Rattle
“Miss Plastique shows off Levin’s intelligence and wit, cleverness and charm. These poems are full of parallels and paradoxes, mirrors and doors. Enough complexity and ambiguity to keep you returning and rereading.”
–The Rumpus
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A Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Writing /Publishing
The second edition of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets offers 18 classroom and workshop tested prompts and a wealth of example poems. Student writers, working poets, and teachers of creative writing will find this an easy-to-use and invigorating resource.
“There may be no end to the usefulness of these writing prompts.”
-Jean Murray Walker, author of Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems
“This book is at once a textbook for the creative writing workshop, a manual for the individual poet, an anthology of idiosyncratic poems that illustrate and inspire.”
-Elaine Terranova, author of Perdido
“Authors Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin provide 18 entertaining and motivating prompts that range from the light-hearted to the serious and challenging. This is an excellent book for poets and for teachers of poetry.”
–NewPages
“The completely revised new edition of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets is bigger, better, more fun and more helpful than ever. The prompts in this expanded edition encourage the poet to explore the imaginary, everyday and exotic, to delve into the humorous and sensual.”
–Write Now Philly
Available wherever books are sold or…
Poems by Odi Gonzales,
Translated from the Spanish by Lynn Levin
A bilingual book
“A haunting gallery of indigenous painters from colonial Peru, most anonymous, is mapped out by Quechua poet Odi Gonzales in this admirable collection. Through Lynn Levin’s lucid renditions, the painters’ eyes become ours, and so does Cusco, the heart of the Inca Empire. Poetry, Gonzales persuades us, is a tool to unveil the past, to come face to face with history.”
-Ilan Stavans, editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry
“A luminous collection of poems based on subversive and syncretistic church art. It comes to us in an outstanding translation by poet Lynn Levin.”
–Poetry International
“What an amazing project the poet and translator Lynn Levin has taken on here, to translate what she calls, in her detailed introduction, a ‘poetry collection as living and talking museum.’ Birds on the Kiswar Tree, presented here in both the original Spanish and in Levin’s lucid English translation, is a compelling series of poems that takes us on a verbal tour of a museum or gallery of works painted by under-appreciated, indigenous Inca-Peruvian artists of the 16th and 17th centuries. The book, by Peruvian poet of Quechua heritage Odi Gonzales, is a virtual documentary of these artists as they quietly defy their colonial oppressors.”
–New Letters
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A Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Poetry
“Sharply drawn, rueful, candid—these poems are a charm against solemnity and pretension: serious and playful by turns or at once, with a bright flare for comedy, a care for the sorrows of our kind, and a wariness of great expectations. Marked by a deep affection for our ephemeral and fretful selves, Fair Creatures of an Hour disarms and delights with its piquant, edgy, penetrating portraits of us all.”
-Eleanor Wilner
“Lynn Levin’s poems are funny and wry reflections on, and of, the human condition.”
-Charles Harper Webb
“Most of the poems in this collection aren’t difficult; they’re not even deceptively simple, but they’re sparkling and intelligent and sometimes wise. People who say they don’t like poetry might well like this.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Levin knows her craft, but isn’t willing to obscure her knowledge with abstract subjects that won’t connect with her readers. These poems all connect and hold universal appeal.”
–Pedestal Magazine
“Lynn Levin does not only see the world around her in a surprising and original way but watches the way her own mind works to produce those quirks and red herrings, which testifies to a great originality.”
–Rattle
Available wherever books are sold, contact the author, or…
A Finalist for Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award
“Some of the poems in Imaginarium resemble the work of Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska in the fresh yet critical eye they cast upon the ordinary. The poems are lean, finely wrought, specific, and startlingly direct, contemplating everything from the end of the world to she-bats.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer
“One of the best and most original books to come out in 2005. Each poem heads the reader toward one emotional shore then lands him/her on another one entirely in smooth and seductively lively writing.”
–The Comstock Review
“The poems in Lynn Levin’s second book, Imaginarium, reveal a mature heart smitten by the elusive promise of happiness in a blemished world. Her poems juxtapose hope and cynicism, beauty and tragedy, and loss and fulfillment with such finesse that the seamless twists and turns of logic invite multiple readings.”
–Rattle
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“What I love about Lynn Levin’s poems is how she gives herself up to excess and extravagance. This is her road to the spiritual.”
-Gerald Stern
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In Anthologies
A Constellation of Kisses
Diane Lockward, ed.
Terrapin Books, 2019
Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse
Grace Bauer and Julie Kane, ed.
Lost Horse Press, 2017
Rabbit Ears: Poems about TV
Joel Allegretti, ed.
NYQ Books, 2015
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry
Deborah Ager and M. E. Silverman, ed.
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013
The Torah: A Women’s Commentary
Tamara Cohn Eshkenazi and Andrea L. Weiss, ed.
URJ Press, 2007
Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania
Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple, ed.
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005
