Attachment Trauma

Description

Jake Levine

The Orchard of Unbidden Fruit

ISBN: 978-1-956921-67-0   (pbk.)

(July 1, 2026) 

Selected poems spanning fifteen years, tracing fractured identities, mental illness, ecological anxiety, Jewish diasporic memory, and expatriate life between Lithuania and South Korea.

Praise for Attachment Trauma

In this pandemonium where war never ends, wearing a crooked smile, the nightmares don’t stop. This poetry collection is a record of sharp battles. Finally, Jake Levine has come into the literary world as the sexiest poet alive. Naked, bathed in blood, metal buckets, potatoes, steel donkeys, fog, like a charming corpse. Here is a world of odor and screams, disease and insanity, where corpses eat and are eaten live. Are you alive?

— Kim Yideum, author of Hysteria and Blood Sisters

The first thing I love about Jake Levine’s poems is their memorability. His phrases enter the mind and make themselves very much at home, you want to quote them, they keep coming back on the tongue. The second thing is the fact that Jake Levine is a master of tone: there is so much tension between the lines because emotions are in conflict, and even if everything is quiet, we are told it is “a quiet no one can imagine / and sometimes I lop both my ears off”. There is no end to hilarity, and yet there is so much quiet that comes after the belly-full laugh. The third thing I love is Jake Levine’s imagery. I mean, how can you not be impressed by the eye that sees “days like books made of ice melting down the shelves” – but this is not just skill for the skill’s sake. There is a deep need for artfulness here, for metaphorical texture; the poet, for all his beautiful bravado (surely, Jake Levine would agree with Frank O’Hara’s notion that a lyric poet rides on the nerve alone) is mining unanswerable questions, searching for meaning of our being here at all. My evidence? It is right here: “in the fierce river that splits your country / I swim inside the ribcage / of the invented self, diagramming / the memory of a field I call home.” That, friends is a metaphysics. And Jake Levine, via images, tone, and music, those blessed tools of poetic craft, makes it memorable.

— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Jake Levine’s debut is as humane, vulnerable, anxious, funny, compensating, and self-aware as I knew it would be. The roving poems in this enchanted forest of corpses are often enlivened by truth-seeking conversations between the poet and poetry community, poetic predecessors, and friends—all mitigated through the role of translator, nomad, and recluse. Thus, aesthetics is a study of the hair of Marcello Mastroianni. The heart is a kebab. The soul is belly lint. And I am swayed by all of it. Yes, a dark insouciance runs through these poems like a rip current, but all the better to drift far from the shore to see the bright flotsam glittering there—to “sink gently into the tide.”  

— Richard Greenfield

Jake Levine rides slalom-like down sutures tearing between surrealism and apocalypse, hallucination and heartbreak, system overload and holocaust. These poems writhe in the spinning center of the end of a broken world in which “all that’s left of the rose bouquets / are thorns.” 

— Malachi Black

Jake Levine is a firesteed. Traditionally, a particularly marvelous horse was said, by poets, to have ‘bones of flame.’

— Charles Alexander, Editor and Poet