{"product_id":"breath-isbn-9780375710780","title":"Breath","description":"Always a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine looks back at his own life as well as the adventures of his ancestors, his relatives, and his friends, and at their rites of passage into an America of victories and betrayals. He transports us back to the street where he was born “early in the final industrial century” to help us envision an America he’s known from the 1930s to the present. His subjects include his brothers, a great-uncle who gave up on America and returned to czarist Russia, a father who survived unspeakable losses, the artists and musicians who inspired him, and fellow workers at the factory who shared the best and worst of his coming of age. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThroughout the collection Levine rejoices in song–Dinah Washington wailing from a jukebox in midtown Manhattan; Della Daubien hymning on the crosstown streetcar; Max Roach and Clifford Brown at a forgotten Detroit jazz palace; the prayers offered to God by an immigrant uncle dreaming of the Judean hills; the hoarse notes of a factory worker who, completing another late shift, serenades the sleeping streets. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike all of Levine’s poems, these are a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit, the persistence of life in the presence of the coming dark.Philip Levine is the author of sixteen collections of poems and two books of essays. He has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award in 1980 for \u003ci\u003eAshes\u003c\/i\u003e and again in 1991 for \u003ci\u003eWhat Work Is\u003c\/i\u003e, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for \u003ci\u003eThe Simple Truth. \u003c\/i\u003eHe divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Fresno, California.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePhilip Levine’s \u003ci\u003eThe Mercy, New Selected Poems, The Simple Truth, \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e What Work Is\u003c\/i\u003e are available in Knopf paperback.\u003cb\u003eThe Lesson\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEarly in the final industrial century\u003cbr\u003eon the street where I was born lived\u003cbr\u003ea doctor who smoked black shag\u003cbr\u003eand walked his dog each morning\u003cbr\u003eas he muttered to himself in a language\u003cbr\u003eonly the dog knew.  The doctor had saved \u003cbr\u003emy brother’s life, the story went, reached\u003cbr\u003etwo stained fingers down his throat\u003cbr\u003eto extract a chicken bone and then\u003cbr\u003ebowed to kiss the ring--encrusted hand\u003cbr\u003eof my beautiful mother, a young widow\u003cbr\u003eon the lookout for a professional.\u003cbr\u003eYears before, before the invention of smog, \u003cbr\u003ebefore Fluid Drive, the eight-hour day,\u003cbr\u003ethe iron lung, I'd come into the world\u003cbr\u003ein a shower of industrial filth raining\u003cbr\u003efrom the bruised sky above Detroit. \u003cbr\u003eTime did not stop.  Mother married\u003cbr\u003ea bland wizard in clutch plates\u003cbr\u003eand drive shafts.  My uncles went off\u003cbr\u003eto their world wars, and I began a career \u003cbr\u003ein root vegetables.  Each morning,\u003cbr\u003ejust as the dark expired, the corner church\u003cbr\u003etolled its bells. Beyond the church \u003cbr\u003ean oily river ran both day and night\u003cbr\u003eand there along its banks I first conversed \u003cbr\u003ewith the doctor and Waldo, his dog. \u003cbr\u003e\"Young man,\" he said in words \u003cbr\u003eresembling English, \"you would dress\u003cbr\u003eheavy for autumn, scarf, hat, gloves. \u003cbr\u003eNot to smoke,\" he added, \"as I do.\" \u003cbr\u003eEleven, small for my age but ambitious,\u003cbr\u003eI took whatever good advice I got, \u003cbr\u003ethough I knew then what I know\u003cbr\u003enow:  the past, not the future, was mine.  \u003cbr\u003eIf I told you he and I became pals\u003cbr\u003eeven though I barely understood him,\u003cbr\u003ewould you doubt me? Wakened before dawn\u003cbr\u003eby Catholic bells, I would dress\u003cbr\u003ein the dark -- remembering scarf, hat, gloves --\u003cbr\u003eto make my way into the deserted streets \u003cbr\u003eto where Waldo and his master ambled \u003cbr\u003ethe riverbank.  Sixty-four years ago,\u003cbr\u003eand each morning is frozen in memory,\u003cbr\u003eeach a lesson in what was to come. \u003cbr\u003eWhat was to come? you ask.  This world\u003cbr\u003eas we have it, utterly unknowable, \u003cbr\u003eutterly unacceptable, utterly unlovable,\u003cbr\u003ethe world we waken to each day \u003cbr\u003ewith or without bells.  The lesson was \u003cbr\u003ein his hands, one holding a cigarette,\u003cbr\u003ethe other buried in blond dog fur, and in\u003cbr\u003ehis words thick with laughter, hushed, \u003cbr\u003eincomprehensible, words that were sound\u003cbr\u003eonly without sense, just as these must be.\u003cbr\u003eStaring into the moist eyes of my maestro,\u003cbr\u003eI heard the lost voices of creation running \u003cbr\u003eover stones as the last darkness sifted upward,\u003cbr\u003evoices saddened by the milky residue\u003cbr\u003eof machine shops and spangled with first light,\u003cbr\u003ediscordant, harsh, but voices nonetheless.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302746640613,"sku":"NP9780375710780","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375710780.jpg?v=1767723054","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/breath-isbn-9780375710780","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}