An Anthology of Rain
by Phillis Levin
(Barrow Street Press, 2025) Reviewed by Abriana Jetté
A chair, a thread, a wooden spoon. A friendship. A flame. A floor of lava. An Anthology of Rain, Phillis Levin’s sixth collection of poetry, converts objects to memory, moments to matter. Whether in prose poems or traditional forms like tanka, readers slip through cities and mailboxes, moving from personal rituals to communal acts of survival. In its entirety, the collection conceptualizes change, as in the way a new chair changes a room, the way a hat changes a face, or the way a place changes a person. Boundaries are drawn, rose-stemmed swords crossed, all while Levin delivers internalized rhyme and sparse lines with elegant sonic restraint.
When considering Levin’s oeuvre, change is not just thematic but also structural, as An Anthology of Rain unveils a compelling new selection of prose poems like “Map Makers: A Sketch” and “Secret Rites,” poems which blend narrative and wonder, offering associative leaps appropriate for the vignette’s fleeting qualities.
“Secret Rites” opens with our speaker recalling a girlhood pastime of alchemizing her bedroom into an archipelago of make-believe. Her rugs become two islands; the oak-wooden floor, the ocean. She recalls sitting: “on one and, without standing up, move to the other without touching the floor.” Over and over, night after night. What’s at stake? What would happen if her young body dared touch the wooden sea as she traveled furiously from rug to rug, back and forth, rug to water to rug? Her self-imposed rules are clear: she’d suffer “a death by drowning.” Imagination serves as a Levin’s life-vest here and will continue to buoy her through the ebbs and flows of her young adult life.
Levin moves on from this memory to reveal another childhood quirk of leaving stray threads in the pocket of coats while shopping with her mother. With each dropped thread the speaker reveals she felt she “could be elsewhere, live inside that pocket” and daydreams of strangers reaching into these coats to “discover a thread that didn’t belong.” Throughout the collection, readers operate for Levin as such threads. We are pulled in and out of coats and spaces and memories, searching for the places we want to belong.
Midway through, “Secret Rites” pivots from reflections on private rituals to the shared experience of choosing and losing a friendship. The speaker is in college when she meets someone with whom she shares a fast and intimate bond. At dinner each night, the speaker and the new friend take up the task of “blowing out the candle” on the table between them, then “holding a lit match as far from the wick as possible to see how far the little flame can travel.” This sisterhood of traveling flames transforms into a symbol of the intense emotions pulsing between the two women. But the friendship, like the flame, is kinetic, brief. The friends eventually outdistance one another.
“Secret Rites” takes readers into a childhood bedroom, a department stores, a college pub, and, at its close, like that thread, drops us off on Zoom, during the middle of a poetry course our speaker leads during the pandemic. Students share childhood memories across screens. It is this conversation that prompts Levin to share her memory of rug island, her imaginative maritime adventures. “‘The floor is lava!’ one of them calls out from a square somewhere on my screen. Squares erupt in laughter as generations converge. A moment of transformation, of change; what was once private reveals itself as universal practice. Secret rites become communal instincts. We might stitch different patterns, make different rules, but here we are, all of us, using the same thread.
“Duel of Roses” also highlights the significance of shared play. In the poem, the speaker duels with Italian painter Veronica Piraccini. “En garde. En garde!” the women jest with roses in a kitchen in Rome while water boils for dinner during the year of the Great Jubilee. Veronica, “a madonna in a fury,” works the cheese grater to “amass a cloud of cheese” for the carbonara; Veronica, a classic beauty. From the windows, from the streets, all the boys call to her, "che bella, che bella / Marilyn Monroe / from a wingèd scooter on the go."
The poem is filled with the warmth, wit, and the wild ordinariness of having dinner with a friend. It is again our speaker’s imaginative resilience, the act of turning roses into swords, that shifts the scene.
“Wooden Spoon” stands alone in its consolation on stasis. The speaker considers how "It is good to be a wooden spoon / and be broken." The line plays with readers, half shrug, half-truth. Its sentiment suggests the power of neutrality, of not getting too hot, not getting too cold. Levin doesn’t romanticize the spoon so much as test it against the rest of the collection’s whirling transformations. Is it possible to remain unchanged? Is it better? Levin doesn’t offer answers, but so she brings these tensions to the surface, all by calling attention to the ordinary qualities of the spoon.
In “To a New Chair” the speaker delights in the arrival of new chair, and she prepares the space, meditating on the will of the chair’s potential to “carry [her] far.” Levin plays with concepts of both the speaker’s and the chair’s presence and absence. Once the chair arrives, the speaker will be “beside the point”, a striking phrase that offers pause. Is this a desire to let go? To be transported elsewhere? Is it a will for invisibility? To let the new chair take over? Whether this is transcendence or erasure the chair is the reason. And glory to the chair, says the poet, whose grandeur is powerful enough to do the job of granting the speaker such change.
“Chamber” also explores the intertwined themes of absence and presence. The poem opens with a cummings-esque echo. Levin writes: “The heart at the heart at the heart of the room,” a simple repetition, mimicking the natural iambs as well as the da-Dum-da-Dum of the beating heart. The simple syntax, though, is haunted by the poem's implications. Our bodies and hearts may place upon some space specific rhythms and rituals to evoke meaning, but these meanings are transient, fleeting. In the end, with or without a chair, the room remains a room, indifferent to whether we are in it or not.
Chairs become portals, roses become swords, and childhood games resurface on Zoom screens. Has everything changed? Has nothing changed? The rug is still a rug; the rose, a rose; the room, a room.
An Anthology of Rain hums with masterful musicality and a sophisticated attentiveness Levin delivers transitions of philosophical eloquence with the straight-forwardness of an investigative, attentive eye. The poems are fiercely clear and strikingly original. Like rain, it is a collection that nourishes, reveals, and, at times, alters the landscapes of our imagination.
Abriana Jetté is an internationally published writer whose work has been supported by the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and has appeared or is forthcoming in PublicBooks, Best New Poets, PLUME, Tampa Review, Poetry New Zealand, and other places. She currently teaches for Kean University and lives in New Jersey with her daughter.
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