In her second full-length collection, Levitsky (Under the Sun) 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, June 2009

Nearly touching are the ethical realm of our obligation to others and the aesthetic world of our freedom from such obligations. Levitsky's Neighbor confronts this imaginary dividing line—in the process, creating a poetry that both provokes community and critiques our social habituations. This is my neighborhood.

—Charles Bernstein

"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 Levitsky¹s 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

Rachel Levitsky’s first full length volume, Under the Sun, was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly (a+bend, 1999), Dearly 356, Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The Adventures of Yaya and Grace (PotesPoets, 1999) and 2(1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998). Levitsky writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. Her work is published in magazines such as The Recluse, Sentence, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Global City, The Hat, Skanky Possum, Lungfull! and the anthologies, Boog City (vol. I & II), Bowery Women, and 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology. Recently her work was translated into Icelandic for the anthology 131.839 Slög Med Bilum by Eiríkur Örn Nordahl. Online poetry and critical essays can be found on such sites as Narrativity, Duration Press, How2, and Web Conjunctions. She has taught poetry workshops at Woodland Pattern, Naropa University, Poets House, the Poetry Project and the Pratt Institute. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna*, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics. Currently she serves as the CPW Fellow in Poetics & Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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