Robert Matt Taylor on Philip Levine’s What Work Is

A month or so ago, I met a friend I hadn’t seen in a while for a drink—an ordinary excursion, but like so many ordinary things made strange by the years we’d just lived through, simply to be out in the evening high-tide of strangers in a downtown bar, we both agreed, still felt consequential. We were getting reacquainted; over the course of the pandemic we’d drifted, our communications dwindling from a regular exchange of manuscripts to sporadic text-message check-ins and finally into what felt like meaningful, mutual silence. At one point, I’d wondered if I would ever read her work or even see her again—I had, in fact, more or less accepted that I might not. She’d had a lot of trouble making room for poetry, she said, and had been ashamed. Of course, I understood. Who could account for all the odd effects of those foreboding and seemingly endless years?