Gracie Leavitt’s debut collection, Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star, uses R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth as its intertext, passages from his book making up pages of Leavitt's own. In Operating Manual, Fuller offers a critique of professional specialization and emphasizes “long distance thinking” as a way of more comprehensively addressing “spaceship earth,” the transitory home in which we all live.
Fuller’s critique amends the Stephen Hawking quotation from which Leavitt’s title is drawn: “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” Following Fuller, we might be able to understand the universe if we learn new ways to look. Leavitt’s poems are about how to look, and how to figure out what there is to see.
Leavitt’s poems attune the reader to the frame of their viewership. Her “long distance thinking” informs a poetics simultaneously devoted to engaging and subverting meaning. The first and third sections of the book, entitled “Gap Gardening” I and II respectively, employ Rosmarie Waldrop’s concept of “gap gardening,” a mode of writing that cultivates discontinuity by bringing the gap offered by the margins of a poem into its body. - Davy Knittle
paperback, 104 pages, 6 x 8 in
Publication Date: 2014
ISBN: 978-1-937658-16-8
A playful, intoxicating debut by a young poet dedicated to expanding the boundaries of lyric poetry
Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star, Gracie Leavitt's first full-length collection, draws on rich lyric history, the love poem as prism, in an effort to create a postmodern pastoral. Leavitt's lines—a baroque tracery, sometimes dark, teasing prose, and pronoun-packed—and unstoppable syntax define her unique poetic vision. This idyll, with its bucolic scenery, its domestic scale, its erotic charge, charges forward into an ecofeminist future.
“Her heart has a huge vocabulary. The erotic frictions and syntactic torsions that make her work so exciting on the surface never linger in the abstract but always come close, close, inviting us into the play of feeling and, above all, the play of play.”—Robert Kelly
Reviews
"In addition to its elegiac overtones, Leavitt's poetry is not infrequently invested in feeling globally, and in the possibility of an aesthetic that reclaims even as it celebrates and describes. In 'Love letter to my detriment,' the space of the garden becomes the space of America in which the poet is embedded, and environmental toxicity and climate change motivate its coinages, elisions, self-doubt, and grammatical breakdown ... Finally, though, Leavitt's overloaded aesthetic is not perhaps a pessimistic one. Instead, it suggests that a certain kind of profusion is not only political but also ultimately useful. Prose passages from the writings of R. Buckminster Fuller punctuate the book; the first of these describes a man discovering the principle of leverage from an encounter with a tree fallen across his path. Leavitt later quotes Fuller: 'the spoken word [...] was the first industrial tool." Instead of Fuller's technological utopias, Leavitt gives us a gendered space churning with words and things and bodies, with words as bodies and things—a counter-aesthetic of growth, biological density, reproductive work. Such a poetics, we're given to understand, is not just about decoration: it's equally able to mourn and to celebrate, to sing a superfund site and to question our notions of genius and girlhood. To 'put on earth this little space my desire for desire forms" is a decadent act, but not a useless one." —Lindsay Turner
"Digging into Gracie Leavitt's first book, Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star is a lot like starting a garden bed. The process is arduous, but highly rewarding. If you have ever spent time bent over a garden bed, hacking away at hard-packed earth, you know what it's like to discover truth. Leavitt's poems demand undivided attention, but once you break a sweat and find your rhythm, everything shifts to its rightful place. The story is in the soil as Leavitt invites you on the walk to get there." —Amber Mozurak
"Gracie Leavitt's Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star shows how poetry can shape itself around a prickly surface that proves nonetheless irresistible. These are poems constructed around long run-on sentences and an idiosyncratic and Latinate lexicon. Poems like this should, one thinks, be uninviting, but their energy proves otherwise. The rough edges scratch where it itches ... A distinctive aspect of this work is its peculiar syntax. Not only are the sentence structures long—one clause or phrase layering on another—but the syntactical formations (yes, they feel geologic) are defamiliarized, upending the reader's sense of order amid subject, object, and verb. As the imagistic markers are often of the natural world (birds, flora), the reader feels as though she had landed suddenly in a strange, not entirely hospitable Eden, 'awaiting one dark proof to be / aroused.' The lines twine around and amid each other; it's nearly impossible to quote from this work in a manner that feels adequate to the poems themselves. Here, syntax becomes a core constituent of meaning, conjoining rhythm, image, and idea in ways that cannot be tidily excised or framed. Traveling through these poems ('to be a thought on landscape disfigured') is a constant exercise in shifting foreground and background." —Elizabeth Robinson for Rain Taxi
"Formidable vocabulary and cavalier jumps between subject matter are standard in Leavitt’s debut collection of post-modern pastorals. These are brainy poems where feats of syntactic contortion occur even on the microscopic level: 'a new sentence is a sentence/ between two sentences.' Malleable and maximalist, the poems don’t stack up neatly and they require an active and nimble mind to follow along the tactful turns: 'Assorodus, demure for once/ you xerox me a starry night/ damp flowers path, the monocrop/ bee-quiet evolves matutinal song/ of agony aunt heart-fracking until/ cold planets, ticking, cease.' Bouncing between abstract elements and tender emotions, Leavitt’s strength stems from her ability to operate simultaneously in different thematic spaces."
"This poet is a gracious and gutsy student of the overwhelm of living, and of what happens when death is wholly given to, by the book's subjects, its eco-ephemera—what does this knowing on the part of the girl do to literariness? While at the same time how the book seems to want to elide death: "a new sentence is a sentence between two sentences." How the book wants to claim the inevitable inheritances that spring from language to language, earth to earth, person to person, death to life. So much love in this, such appreciation of the homiest and the most cosmic detail, such an ambiguity of value. What this Ophelia asks, with and maybe past Shakespeare's, is what happens when she knows how she is "importun'd," pressed upon, demanded of, drawn down by the world, and more than that, what happens when she refuses to not know this as a human condition..." - Sara Jane Stoner
