In her latest poetry book, Louise Landes Levi is ’on the road’. Nomadic & hermetic, exiled and initiated, she reveals uninvited encounter and encounter w. the marvelous through the poetics of collage, the cut-up of perceptual process. Mostly untitled, the poems narrate dissociation but also pleasure, poetry as practice, as purification, itself a vehicle for the re-emergent feminine.Her pilgrimage leads to the European city, for her in decline, to her birthplace New York City and to the villages surrounding Mt. Amiata, site of rebirth & in this work reexamination, a marked departure from her earlier Guru Punk (coolgrove press, 1999). "Louise Landes-Levi joins the unclaimed territory of visionary writers and artists like Simone Weil, Mirabai and Hilma af Klimt. Desire and transcendence are both expressed with astonishing beauty. Her sharp eye trained on the human condition in samsara her quest takes the reader through the pain of love affairs, fulfilled and broken, and the elevation and strength endowed by moments of union with the
divine. In this collection the reader finds herself Dante to Landes Levi’s Virgil. Instead of the circles of hell, she guides us through her chakras, invites us so intimately into her solitary heart and vastly expansive consciousness, that we too are embraced."- Bonny Finberg (Kali’s Day)
"Unclear if seeker LLL works for the CIA or Yahweh, however drinking from this ecstase of yearning and soaring on the astral plane will transfer a certain wisdom if not at least a delicious relief, something to strive for amidst the madness of the eros. if we wld. just learn / how to die, we cld. really / enjoy the adventure of being / ALIVE. writes L and damn does she show us one truth of rebirth. Thank Goddess these poems exist, to remind us there is yet fruit in this wasteland: at last, / I appeased my / ancestors ... & you wonder why / I memorize the names / of / plants, / Plotting the return, while you plot / w/o knowing it the last / note in the / eternal, / lament. Brava Louise!"- Katy Bohinc (Trinity Star Trinity)