Lauren Levin's The Braid Reviewed for NOLA's Antenna/Room 220

Lauren Levin’s The Braid was published by Krupskaya Books last year, and Levin went to her hometown of New Orleans on New Year's Day to read from the book at Antenna Gallery/Room 220. The Braid "introduces Levin’s ability — within and across stanzas — to re-present reality ('I saw the police stop cars and search them'), represent the interiority of a moment ('time approaches a love that can’t be read or written'), and expose the possibility that these presentations can jointly articulate and produce new formal and social relations," writes Engram Wilkinson now in a review at Antenna's blog. More from "Confronting the surrounding, unbearable silence":

Levin continues:

I think I feel her also, washing or retreating on the tides of her sleep
Love’s body, which is the body of peace anxiously sought
Or on something crackling, aloof, or a warm field—the life-like field of her moderating, crackling alertness

In this interrogation of representative categories, Levin does not erase her subjects with some generalizing discourse. Levin’s daughter Alejandra, partner Tony, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ronald Reagan, are named, interactive subjects throughout The Braid. From “I Want Our Minds to Be the Same:”

Destruction is an overwhelming force the joy of it inside her causes action
I wonder if Pasolini had to know that Reagan existed I hope not
What was Reagan doing in 1975 when Pasolini was murdered, when he died in Ostia

Stanzas later: “There’s a photo of Tony reading to Alejandra as a bookmark in my copy of / Pasolini’s Roman Poems.” It would be a disservice to the ingenuity and lyricism of this poem and collection to offer the cliché that “the personal is political,” but the associative movement in “I Want Our Minds to Be the Same” compels a reader to re-imagine the relationship between these two impossibly discrete categories. The immense problem of whose agency, where “safety is intolerable but so is being property,” is braided with a critique of financialized subject-constitution within state and even family formations—in which Levin-as-speaker doubly presents (dis)possession as the desire for modernity and experience of it:

Normal people must agree to have their worth vary
but I didn’t want to enter the space where my worth would be nothing—
I’m bonded by my creditors, who have the most interest in keeping me alive

Who touched the baby before she touched herself
Who touched me before I touched myself

The gestures I make over her contribute to her loss of inwardness
then we keep moving and cross paths with others
to give them our weakness and try heedlessly to protect them with our eyes

Read the full review (and find correct line breaks!) at Anntena.