Description:
Often called "evening prayer," vespers is held around sunset. Its purpose: to give thanks for the day and offer a sacrifice of praise to God. In Jane Lewty's Vespers, she superimposes the tropes of the Christian ritual onto a very different type of sacrifice--that of making art.
Review Quotes:
"Jane Lewty transforms the ancient ritual of evening prayer into a searching, contemporary art of attention. Through antiphons, hymns, and restless meditations, she threads together city light and basilica shadow, art history and automatons, dread and devotion, asking what it means to persist--on the bench, in the hour, within the sentence. These poems are intellectually agile and lyrically electric. Radiant, restless, and formally daring, Vespers makes twilight an aperture where language itself becomes a form of necessary vigil."--Peter Gizzi, author, Fierce Elegy