My Oceanography

Critic Reviews

Poet-novelist Harriet Levin succeeds brilliantly in entering the life of German-born American painter-sculptor Eva Hesse who died of brain cancer at 36 after early recognition in the New York art scene. Millan’s powers of empathy allow her to capture imagined scenes of Hesse’s failed marriage to a fellow artist, dark auras of her parent’s divorce, all against a backdrop of Hitler’s regime. Levin’s is an impressive feat of art and literary bonding to show a similar love for the physical world: its depth and beauty, its voracity for particulars. This is a richly given, complex book that does honor to a like-minded artist.

– Colette Inez, author of The Luba Poems

Erotic, angry, probing, brilliant, Harriet Levin questions “why I’m an artist, as if such criteria exist —they can see it roil and drift, and urging me on,” and the way in which art is derived from wretched longing, cruelty, anguish and envy, in this haunting and disturbing sketchbook of an artist seeking to form a vision of selfhood from the materials of life. Levincunningly probes the tantalizing and mercurial question of whether the vision is the poet’s or the artist as subject, or a manifestation of both in this searing, original work.”

—Jill Bialosky, Vice President, WW Norton & Company

In this collection of poems of imagined interiors, Harriet Levin examines the life of visual artist Eva Hesse. Levin’s poems move beyond the brushstrokes of emotions. She gives us words sculptured out of a troubled marriage, yet words that still undress to reveal the sensual. This is a poetic sketchbook in which Harriet Levin holds up a mirror for Hesse so she might see herself and be celebrated.

– E. Ethelbert Miller, Editor of Poet Lore and author of If God Invented Baseball

“Survivor, Artist Inspired New Poetry Book,” a Review by Selah Maya Zighelboim (Click to Read on the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent)