Levitation for Agnostics is the Arne Weingart’s debut book of poetry and winner of the 2014 New American Press Poetry Prize. The author grew up as a denominationally Conservative Jew in Nashville, TN. Many of the poems explore issues attached to Jewish identity and explore those themes forward and backward in time and American culture. The poems themselves are largely narrative in structure and direct in use of language. Any obscurity or evasiveness is strictly unintentional. Irony (not to be confused with cynicism) could be considered a default setting or departure point for most poems although not an inevitable destination. Humor sometimes happens. The best poems are surrounded by silence.
Although poetry can be thought of as a self-consciously literary genre, the individual poems in this book and the book as a whole are entirely accessible to a non-“literary” audience. The specifically Jewish themes will resonate with American Jews, regardless of background, and the book connects, in the way that only poetry seems capable of, with the universal need for belief.
Poetry
Levitation for Agnostics
- From the Publisher
May 3, 2016
Discussion Questions
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